Romania police probe anti-semitic graffiti at Elie Wiesel home

Romanian police on Saturday announced a probe into anti-semitic graffiti found on the walls of the house where Nobel Peace prize winner Elie Wiesel was born. "An enquiry is underway to identify those responsible," police spokeswoman Florina Metes said, adding that officers were studying footage from surveillance cameras in the northern town of Sighetu Marmatiei, hometown of Holocaust survivor Wiesel who died in New York in 2016. The graffiti, which appeared overnight Friday, was quickly removed by local authorities. "This grotesque act represents an attack not only on the memory of Elie Wiesel but on all the victims of the Holocaust," said the national institute for Holocaust studies, which is named after Wiesel. The Israeli ambassy in Romania condemned an "unprecedented anti-semitic act," and expressed the hope that those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice. Wiesel, born in northern Romania in 1928, survived Auschwitz and devoted his life to keeping memories of the Nazi genocide of World War II from fading away. He settled in the United States after the war and helped challenge the widely held assumption in Romania, following decades of communist rule, that the Germans alone were responsible for the Holocaust. In 2003 he headed a panel of experts that found that between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews, as well as 11,000 Roma, perished on Romanian soil under dictator and Nazi ally Ion Antonescu. He received the received the Nobel prize in 2001. Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 2005