Elie Wiesel Says He Lost Life Savings with Madoff, Suggests Punishment
Famed Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel says he and his wife lost their life savings because it was invested in Bernard Madoff’s claimed $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
In addition, his charity, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, lost $15.2 million, writes the New York Times, reporting on comments Wiesel made in a panel discussion yesterday on the Madoff scandal.
Wiesel, who teaches at Boston University and is about to publish another book, clearly isn’t as badly off as some of those reportedly left penniless by the record-breaking alleged fraud. But the 80-year-old is nonetheless angry and, when asked how he thought Madoff–who is presently under house arrest in a $7 million home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side–should be punished, if he is convicted in the fraud case, Wiesel had a ready answer.
“I would like to see him in a solitary cell with only a screen,” he says, “and on that screen for at least five years of his life, every day and every night, there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, all the time a voice saying, ‘Look what you have done to this old lady, look what you have done to that child, look what you have done,’ nothing else.”
Additional coverage:
Associated Press: “Wiesel recounts meeting Madoff, losing millions”
