Encouraging the next generation to “open the gates to our memory,” Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel urged thousands of students tonight to overcome racism, poverty and violence in today’s world.
“Every minute today, somewhere in this world a child dies of famine or of disease or of violence,” Wiesel said in the speech to more than 6,000 people at Xavier University’s Cintas Center. “How is that possible in a civilized society?
“We have allowed the weakest of us to be targeted,” he added. “This was a regular occurrence in Nazi Germany and to this day, I don’t understand it. Why the children?”
Wiesel, 83, said he sometimes is convinced that the world has not learned the key lessons of the Holocaust, the killing of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany.
He recounted a speech to the United Nations several years ago titled “Will the world ever learn?”
“And I answered it as a pessimist,” Wiesel said Sunday. “Because the world hasn’t learned at all.”
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Boston University professor was 15 when he and his family were deported by the Nazi regime to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
His mother and one of his sisters were killed. Wiesel published his book about the experience, titled “Night,” in 1956. It since has been translated into about 30 languages.
Wiesel has spent decades advocating for oppressed people all over the world, including Soviet Jews, Cambodian refugees and victims of famine and genocide in Africa. more from source
Elie Wiesel Night
- “As he roosts on his pile of gold amid the abuse of Oprah and the literary world, Frey can comfort himself with the thought that Night is not how “it really was”, and that even though there is a vast gulf between what Wiesel actually endured and Frey’s lies about his own life, when it comes making literature he and Wiesel were both in the business of artistic and emotional manipulation, of dressing fiction up as truth.”
Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel’s Night:
Is Frey or Wiesel the Bigger Moral Poseur?
By Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch.com
4-1-6
- When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie Wiesel. It’s as foolproof a character reference as is available today, at least within the Judeo-Christian sphere of moral influence. One can easily see why Oprah Winfrey and her advisers saw an Auschwitz excursion in the company of Wiesel as a sure-fire antidote to salve the wounds sustained by Oprah’s Book Club when it turned out that James Frey had faked significant slabs of his own supposedly autobiographical saga of moral regeneration, A Million Little Pieces.
- source
Night Study Guide
Elie Wiesel’s Night is a memoir that focuses on the final year of the Holocaust-a year that the author spent at Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp. The study guide for Night explores two central questions: What is the relationship between our stories and our identity? To what extent are we all witnesses of history and messengers to humanity?For teachers and students reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, we have developed a number of resources that provide historical context, suggest teaching strategies, and stimulate discussion in the classroom:
Elie, we know you won’t remain silent, but it seems that you and other Jews seem to have no problem at all making society ‘suffer, as you seem to humiliate and even convict and jail those that have opposing contradictions with proof that won’t remain silent to what Holocaust Jews want to shove down everyone’s throats, asking for more and more and getting it.
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