The Perils of Indifference

It can be tempting to look away. It is easier-to avoid such interruptions to our work, our hopes, Dreams.

- Elie Wiesel

In 1944, as a teenager in Hungary, Elie Wiesel, was deported by the Nazis to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Freed by American troops in April 1945, Wiesel went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, 1986. He delivered this speech on 12 April 1999, in the White House, as a part of the Millennium Lecture series. Here is an edited version of the address.

Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy woke up, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. 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.

Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being.

We are on the threshold of a new century. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? Surely it will be judged and judged severely. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, civil wars, senseless assassinations—Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat—bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda; the inhumanity in the gulag and Hiroshima. And, on a different level, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.