Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel Laments Indifference to Suffering

c. 2006 Religion News Service SHORT HILLS, N.J. _ With 1,300 people before him _ most of them fellow Jews _ Elie Wiesel, the world-renowned author and Holocaust survivor, challenged his audience to resist the lure of indifference when it comes to the suffering of others. “You study the history of the 20th century, and […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

SHORT HILLS, N.J. _ With 1,300 people before him _ most of them fellow Jews _ Elie Wiesel, the world-renowned author and Holocaust survivor, challenged his audience to resist the lure of indifference when it comes to the suffering of others.

“You study the history of the 20th century, and the tragedy of all tragedies, and what hurt us was (not just) the cruelty of the killer, but really the indifference of the good people,” Wiesel, 77, said Wednesday night (March 29) at Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills.


Wiesel said he has known five American presidents and asked each why the United States did not bomb the railroad tracks the Germans used to ship millions of Jews to concentration camps.

“If they (Americans) bombed, it would have slowed down the process,” Wiesel said. “And it would have shown the Germans that they cared” about the killings.

The Boston University humanities professor and 1986 Nobel Peace Price winner, who lives in Manhattan, fretted that knowledge of the Holocaust has not prevented other mass killings from occurring.

“What happened to us was to us,” he said of the Holocaust, and of Jews. “But was it the beginning or was it an end? … I do believe that mass murder (still) exists. Massacres, we know … in Bosnia, in Rwanda, now in Darfur.”

He lamented the rise of religious fanaticism internationally.

“In every religion, there is a tendency of people … to go to the extreme,” he said. “In Catholicism, Protestantism, fundamentalism, (and) of course, in Islam. Even in our own religion. I cannot forget that (former Israeli Prime Minister) Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a religious young Jew. I cannot forget that.”

“I cannot forget that before (Rabin’s assassination), a man named Baruch Goldstein … entered into a mosque and with a machine gun, he killed, I think, 27 people in prayer,” he added. “So therefore, fanaticism is not only directed or coming from one religion.”

Wiesel spoke from the bimah in the spacious sanctuary at Temple B’nai Jeshurun at an event billed simply as “An Evening with Elie Wiesel.” His speech was free and open to the public, though about 80 people paid $50 each to have dinner with him beforehand at the synagogue.


He has written 47 books _ memoirs, nonfiction and novels _ but his best-selling work was his first, “Night,” an account of the year he spent in concentration camps with his father.

Wiesel recently became famous to a new generation when Oprah Winfrey in January selected “Night,” which has sold millions of copies since 1958, for her book club. He will discuss the book, and his life, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in May.

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B’nai Jeshurun scheduled Wiesel’s speech last summer, months before Winfrey’s selection of “Night.”

“He has a story to tell, and it’s so important that it get told to as many people as possible,” said Jodi Cooperman, whose family established the synagogue’s Distinguished Speakers Series, for which Wiesel was the first guest.

“There’s a connection to what he went through, and there’s also a sense of urgency because survivors of the Holocaust are not going to be around forever,” Cooperman said.

In “Night,” Wiesel writes of the Nazi executions he witnessed; of seeing babies put into a fiery pit; of watching his father beaten; of seeing Jewish prisoners brawl over bits of food; of a death march between concentration camps; and of how everything he saw affected his thoughts on God.

The book, whose latest edition is 144 pages, begins with Wiesel’s childhood in Sighet, Transylvania, and continues with his deportation to Auschwitz with his mother, father and sister in 1944, when he was 15. Wiesel’s mother and sister died shortly after arriving at Auschwitz and he and his father were forcibly transported to other camps _ Buna, Gleiwitz and Buchenwald.


Wiesel and others were liberated from Buchenwald on April 10, 1945, by American troops.

Though several in the crowd knew Wiesel from Boston University, or even from family connections in Sighet, most were seeing him for the first time.

“You want to hear firsthand from his mouth what happened to him,” said Audrey Brenner, 67, of Florham Park, who read “Night” in the 1970s. “It brings it home, makes it true.”

Wiesel’s popularity with readers has remained strong over the years.

“I’m mainly moved by children. I get about 100 letters from children every month, for years and years,” Wiesel told The Star-Ledger earlier this week. “That’s why I answer every letter. Literally, every letter. Children, they move me. Their questions are pertinent.”

He said the world has a mixed record in responding to the memory of the Holocaust.

“Now there are museums all over the world. Many, many conferences, colloquia and lessons,” he said. “That means there is an awakening, there is an awareness. Where it has failed is, I was convinced that if the world was to receive the testimony of the Holocaust, it would improve itself, it would become a better world. And it hasn’t.”

MO/JL END RNS

(Jeff Diamant covers religion for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

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