Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar, lawyer who advised JFK, dies at 86

American lawyer and writer Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor and former adviser to US President John F. Kennedy, has died in New York aged 86, a French Jewish group said Tuesday.

Pisar was “one of the rare very well-known survivors, along with Elie Wiesel and Simone Veil,” said French Jewish community leader Roger Cukierman, who said he had lost “a friend.”

President Francois Hollande also paid tribute to Pisar, who was deported at the age of 13 to Majdanek, then Auschwitz and Dachau, where he was freed at 16.

“To ensure that the blood spilled became, in his words ‘blood of hope,’ Samuel Pisar dedicated his life to the pressing task of passing down what he had experienced,” said Hollande.

After the war, he became a celebrated academic and international lawyer and in the 1960s served as a trade advisor to Kennedy.

The Polish-born Pisar died in New York on Monday, Cukierman said.