Elie Wiesel Introduction, Main Body and Conclusion

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 his father died there shortly before the Americans liberated it. 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, 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