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Elie Wiesel
Introduction, Main Body and Conclusion
In "The Perils of Indifference" (1999), Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel expressed his public support for the intervention in Kosovo to stop the genocide there, and drew upon the lessons of 20th Century history to justify this action in a very effective way. Bearing in mind that Wiesel is speaking to the president of the United States and the First Lady, he is very careful in his introductory and concluding remarks to thank the United States troops who liberated him from the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. Those familiar with Wiesel's biography would know that its name was Buchenwald, and that he and his family had first been deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944, where his mother and sister were gassed. He and his father were then forced marched to Buchenwald before the Soviets captured Auschwitz, and...
In the main body, however, his main theme is the indifference of the outside world to the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War and perhaps even the indifference of God. No one even warned them about Auschwitz and what their fate would be there, and no one did anything to stop the machinery of extermination. At best the outside world seemed to just stand by all allow this to happen, but Wiesel demands that it should never happen again.
2) Evidence of Effective Overall Organization
His organization is effective in that he reminds his listeners in both the introduction and conclusion that he was once a frightened a confused victim of genocide. All of this had happened to him when he was fifteen years old, and arrived in Auschwitz from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains,…
His organization is effective in that he reminds his listeners in both the introduction and conclusion that he was once a frightened a confused victim of genocide. All of this had happened to him when he was fifteen years old, and arrived in Auschwitz from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, having no real idea of what this place was or what his true fate was going to be. For the Nazis, he and his father only existed to perform slave labor at the Buna factories at Auschwitz until they were starved or worked to death. Only later did he learn that Britain and America knew about this camp by 1944 and did nothing, and he uses this example as a moral warning that President Bill Clinton was correct not to stand aside in Kosovo and allow genocide to occur there. This is what led him to reflect on the profound question of indifference in the face of suffering and persecution, which is the central point of his speech: why do the good people stand aside and do nothing while the perpetrators of genocide carry on with impunity?
3) Verbal Signposts
All the main verbal signposts of the speech center on the theme of indifference in the face of suffering and death, and that in the case of the Jews even God seen to have abandoned them and cared nothing about their fate. These questions of why the outside world seemed so silent and indifferent to the genocide of the Jews have haunted Wiesel his entire life, for obvious reasons, and he organizes his speech around these central themes. Perhaps God simply did not care, and "we felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one" (Wiesel 1999). In his novel Night, God does not hear the prayers of the millions who are being annihilated, while justice, morality and even meaning are absent in a world where the Nazis have absolute power over
Night by Elie Wiesel Though it is called a novel, Night (Wiesel 1982) is actually a memoir about Wiesel's experiences as a young, devout Jewish boy who is forced by World War II Nazis into a concentration camp, along with his family. The main character, Eliezer, is actually Wiesel, and through his descriptions and thoughts about his life before, during and after the concentration camps, Wiesel illustrates ways that people may
How the German army used this deception can be best quoted from Night when the Pole in charge of the block where Eliezer was kept with other men said, "Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Ahead of you lies a long road paved with suffering. Do not lose hope. You have already eluded the worst danger: the selection. Therefore, muster your strength and keep your faith.
They angered God, and as God has done throughout the ages, He punished the Jews. Many of them retain their faith and hope in God, and retained it even during their time in the concentration camps - it was the only thing that helped them to survive when all other hope had died. On the other hand, many Jews saw the camps as a place where they lost their
poison used in the gas chambers, to the thousands of empty suitcases, clearly marked with names, which Nazi personnel emptied and appropriated after their owners were gassed to death. The Nazis not only took the lives of millions of Jews, they took everything that was a reminder of their lives. The world stood by while this occurred, and did nothing. Why did the world stand by and allow millions of
God never intervened and Ellie had to reconsider the role of his faith in his life. Though the absence of God may have led many to question their faith, there is another component of faith that must be considered. Elie's faith in God, by itself, had allowed him to find the strength to carry on as the elders reminded him, "You must never lose faith, even when the sword