Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, gave this impassioned
speech in the East Room of the White House on April 12, 1999, as part of the
Millennium Lecture series, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In the summer of 1944, as a teenager in Hungary, Elie Wiesel, along with his
father, mother and sisters, were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz
extermination camp in occupied Poland. Upon arrival there, Wiesel and his father
were selected by SS Dr. Josef Mengele for slave labor and wound up at the nearby
Buna rubber factory.
Daily life included starvation rations of soup and bread, brutal discipline,
and a constant struggle against overwhelming despair. At one point, young Wiesel
received 25 lashes of the whip for a minor infraction.
In January 1945, as the Russian Army drew near, Wiesel and his father were
hurriedly evacuated from Auschwitz by a forced march to Gleiwitz and then via an
open train car to Buchenwald in Germany, where his father, mother, and a younger
sister eventually died.
Wiesel was liberated by American troops in April 1945. After the war, he
moved to Paris and became a journalist then later settled in New York. Since
1976, he has been Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston
University. He has received numerous awards and honors including the 1986 Nobel
Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also the Founding
Chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial. Wiesel has written over 40 books
including Night, a harrowing chronicle of his Holocaust experiences, first
published in 1960.
At the White House lecture, Wiesel was introduced by Hillary Clinton who
stated, It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to
participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when
the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past
century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo
crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed
of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity.
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 Nigeria, 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 indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means no difference. A strange
and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and
dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is
there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view
indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep
one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world
around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is
so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such
rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all,
awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet,
for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence.
And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible
anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all
prisoners were the Muselmanner, as they were called. Wrapped in their torn
blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space,
unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no
longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They
were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity
then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to
be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be
ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man
can live far from God -- not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in
suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being
inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger
can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does
something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice
that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may
elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference
elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference
is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his
victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political
prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to
respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark
of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we
betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of
the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments
in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple
categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of
times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton
mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now
in the Days of Remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us
did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and
Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did
not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they
had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their
accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and
earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and
conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the
railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State
Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a
great leader -- and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is
exactly 54 years marking his death -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April
the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the
world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave
soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler.
And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in
Jewish history -- I must say it -- his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its
human cargo -- maybe 1,000 Jews -- was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that
happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with
hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put
in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the
United States, was sent back.
I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood
those who needed help. Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark? A
thousand people -- in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most
generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don't
understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the
victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those
non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the Righteous Gentiles, whose
selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few?
Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save
their victims during the war?
Why did some of America's largest corporations continue to do business with
Hitler's Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that
the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil
obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic
century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel
on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel's peace treaty with
Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with
drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in
this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to
intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were
uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged
with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This
time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society
has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we
really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of
victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and
far? Is today's justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a
lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of
children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage
other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in
the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most
tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces,
their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every
minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them -- so many of
them -- could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian
Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years
of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried
by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel - April 12, 1999
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