| 22.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 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 -- 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
non-Jews, 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.
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