I’m not sure anyone can say it better than Elie Wiesel:
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.
Read the whole thing. Thanks to Noam for sending this on.
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Thanks for the link. I especially appreciate how Wiesel articulates indifference, as opposed to anger or hatred.
Elie Wiesel spoke at my university this year and it was incredibly moving. He spoke then as he spoke in the speech linked, about the dangers and horrors of indifference.
For those who, like me, had not heard of Elie Wiesel until recently, read “Night” for an indescribable remembrance of the Holocaust.
A few years ago in his homily on a different topic, a priest at my church said , “The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s apathy.”
Elie Wiesel gives the prime example. Particularly searing are the words, “And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets.”
I read Night in 8th grade… the ending… when he was free but still trapped inside…
I did not know Holocaust Remembrance Day was in spring.
Maybe world leaders will use this as a reason to I don’t know, do something effectively in a certain region that starts with D?
Dear Kaitlyn, would you please answer some questions? (1) What’s the second letter? (2) Um, can you give us any other hints? (3) Does helping this region help our
economic interestsnational security? Thanks. Love, the World Leaders.P.S. from Chris: One of my senators has two statements about the D-region on his website–the most recent from 3/31/2006. The other has zero. Zero! He has information on Denmark, Dubai, and Djibouti, but nothing on Darfur.
Thank you for the link. I have the greatest respect for Elie, although I’ve never had the guts to read Night.
I used to edit a community newspaper in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors (which was why the Nazis wanted to “march” there in the ’80s—how depraved is that?). Anyway, one woman I met had been personally tormented as a child by Josef Mengele because she had an identical twin sister, which fulfilled a condition for his demented “experiments.” She survived; the sister did not.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that the Holocaust is not just a metaphor or a rhetorical tool. It’s real history that happened to real people.
Thanks for posting this link -
For those unfamiliar with Holocaust Lit., in addition to “Night,” I highly recommend Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz,” Charlotte Delbo’s “Days and Memory,” and Tadeuz Borowski’s “This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Found a great resource while I was teaching at Keene State College for a semester: The Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies
Excellent activism here & now, historic information, action alerts on Darfur, all around good organization.
Dear Chris, I feel like shit, but I’m certain *my* senators (R-Tennessee, and, shockingly, R-Tennessee) have nothing to say about it, either.
The world sucks.
Since people wouldn’t talk about the Armenian Genocide (back in the ’90s, some students petitioned a college professor of Turkish studies to add the genocide and were turned down, according to, sigh my immaturity, the comic book, The Big Book of Bad.), why should they care about some Jews?
And we did care, but it’s still going on!
This and the shooting in Virgina – what is *wrong* with people?
Oh, and today’s a good day – why are your taxes due tomorrow? Because today’s Emancipation Day! And, oh, Holocaust Remembrance Day. (We have *got* to work on our scheduling.)
PS- I say I feel like shit to excuse me from looking up my senator’s websites. *Especially* Bob fucking Corker.
I took a class on genocide my senior year, but I can’t remember the name of it!
It was only a semester class, and I missed the last half of that semester.
My homebound teacher was fascinated by the textbook, and so was I.
I read all of it, and Theriomorph, I’m writing down those titles!
(Got Night at a garage sale with a paperback book on world religions for a dollar last fall.)
Facing History And Ourselves!
That’s it.
Elie Wiesel has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.
He also walks his talk for all the genocide victims everywhere, which makes him one damn fine human.
Another really good thing to read about the Holocaust is Art Speigelman’s comic-book-style Maus series, which really brought home to me “the banality of evil” aspect.
Yes, “MAUS” is brilliant – the 2nd generation survivor story as much as the 1st. LOVE.
Only kind of on-thread, but for graphic novel lovers (or people like me who were won over to them by Speigelman), Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” – the memoir of an Iranian girl, is as powerful an invitation into cultural, personal, global experience as “MAUS” was – haven’t yet read the second in the series, but the first is damned instructive about Iran and historic American relationship to the country, among other things.
One more, and then I’ll stop with the book-junkie-ing for Yom Ha-Sho’ah :
James Young’s “Writing and Re-Writing the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation” and “The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning” are both profound examinations of the ethics of representation with profound connections to feminist analysis.
If you tend to run into Holocaust denier fucktards, Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman’s Denying History will help you shut them up.
Oh my god, I love Art Speigelman. The Memphis Library only had his post-Sept. 11th work – I’d love to get my hands on Maus, if only for a week.
I am going to read Art Speigelman’s Maus I and II. He won an award for his graphic novel about the Holocaust. There’s many genocides in history that should be remembered on Holocaust Remembrance Day in addition to the Holocaust. Some acts of genocide should include the Armenian Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the East Timor Genocide, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Nanjing Massacre, and many others that I haven’t listed.
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