65. Elie Wiesel - The Perils of Indifference
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies,
friends:
Fiftyfour 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 CommanderinChief
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 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 wideranging
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 nearly 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 in 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, the 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 nonJews,
those Christians, that we call 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.
