45 Reading #1: The Perils of Indifference – Elie Wiesel
45 Reading #1: The Perils of Indifference – Elie Wiesel
Background
You might know Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) from his famous and harrowing autobiography, Night, that recounts his experiences as a prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II. Though he was just a boy at that time, the experience set Wiesel on a lifelong journey to fight genocide and stand up for human rights. He delivered this speech, “The Perils of Indifference,” at the White House in 1999 as part of a speaking series to mark the end of the 20th Century.
While You Read
How does Wiesel define indifference? What examples, stories, comparisons, and vocabulary does he use?
What are some of the criteria to define indifference?
Who is Wiesel’s audience for this speech? What does he want them to do or think differently after they hear his message and understand indifference on his terms?
What other vocabulary or unique terms does Wiesel define in this speech? Why?
Elie Wiesel – The Perils of Indifference
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends:
Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. “Gratitude” is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary, or Mrs. Clinton, for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations (Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin), bloodbaths in Cambodia and Algeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifferen