Like Elie Wiesel, both of my parents were survivors of Auschwitz. I was born in 1948 in the displaced persons’ camp of Bergen-Belsen. My father was the leader of the survivors in the British zone of Germany from 1945 to 1955. In the US, he continued that work and it was in that capacity that my father met Elie in the late 1950s. At that time Elie was a writer, but primarily a journalist. He used to be a frequent guest in our home. So I’ve known him since before I was a teenager.

I became his first teaching assistant at the City University of New York. Over the years we remained close friends and worked on numerous projects involving Holocaust remembrance, human rights and, most notably, the creation of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. It was a friendship of 55 years. There are far too many instances now, when I am three-quarters of the way through dialling his number before I remember it is not going to work any more.

He said if you wallow in suffering it wins... if you use it, humanity wins

When we first knew Elie, he was not a public figure. Though his book Night had been published at the end of the 1950s, there was very little interest in the Holocaust. Elie changed that, I think, with a combination of his personality and his moral voice in a succession of different events. He famously admonished Ronald Reagan when the president went to visit the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany in 1985, saying: “That place is not your place. Your place is not at the graves of the SS, it is with the victims of the SS.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elie Wiesel with his son Elisha and Nobel peace prize committee chairman Egil Aarvik at the award ceremony in Oslon, December 1986 Photograph: Inge Gjellesvik/AFP/Getty Images

A decade later he turned to President Clinton at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington and used the occasion to speak publicly about the crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia. Elie was both a writer rooted in the memory of the Holocaust and the leading voice for taking that memory and having it address contemporary instances of genocide. He once said if you wallow in suffering it wins, if you turn it to a force to alleviate suffering, then humanity wins.

For him, winning the Nobel prize was another means to that end. He didn’t allow his worldwide fame to go to his head. Until very recently he was teaching at Boston University and his students were his priority. That time with them, teaching them, listening to them, was sacrosanct. He raised everybody around him, both with a tremendous sense of humour and an equally almost obsessive curiosity. You did not tell him about something you had read in a book without him saying: “Let me read the book.” He would then discuss the book with you in detail and what you had said about it.

My hero: Elie Wiesel by David Miliband Read more

In this way he remained to the end a true student of life. Elie was determined that his time in the realm of the Holocaust would never define him. The essence of his being was who he had been before he entered that realm and who he became afterwards. He was a loving and attentive husband, and father, and a devoted grandfather and a loyal, dedicated friend. At the very end he was too ill to speak but right up to a week before his death I would see him and we would talk several times a week and the first thing he always said, in French, was “raconte!” – “Tell me what’s happening with you!”

His first thought was never for himself, or to tell you how he was feeling, it was always: what is going on in your life? And he really meant it. It wasn’t perfunctory. His kindness was never for show, it was who he was.

• Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2016 in full here

