[continued from Friday, 16 January post]
Elie Wiesel says,
''....to be indifferent to suffering
is what makes the human being
inhuman.
Indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred.
Anger can at time be
creative.
One writes a great poem,
a great symphony.
One does something special for the sake of humanity
because on is angry
at the injustices one witnesses.
But indifference is never creative.
Even hatred at times may
elicit a response.
You fight it.
You denounce it.
You disarm it.
Elie Wiesel says,
''....to be indifferent to suffering
is what makes the human being
inhuman.
Indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred.
Anger can at time be
creative.
One writes a great poem,
a great symphony.
One does something special for the sake of humanity
because on is angry
at the injustices one witnesses.
But indifference is never creative.
Even hatred at times may
elicit a response.
You fight it.
You denounce it.
You disarm it.
Indifference elicits
no response.
Indifference
is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end.
And therefore,
indifference is always the friend of the enemy,
for it benefits the aggressor -
never the victim,
whose pain is magnified
when he or she feels forgotten.
The political prisoner in his cell,
the hungry children,
the homeless refugees -
not to respond to their plight,
not to relive their solitude....
is to exile them from
human memory.
And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.
And this is one of the most important lessons
of this outgoing century's
wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.''
*
''In the place that I come from,
society was composed of three simple categories:
the killers,
the victimes,
and the
bystanders.
....in the death camps,
our only miserable consolation was that we believed
Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets,
that the leaders of the free world
did not know what was going on behind those
black gates and barbed wire;
that they had no knowledge of the war
against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought,
surely those leaders would have moved
heaven and earth to intervene.
They would have spoken out with
great outrage and conviction.
They would have bombed the railways to Birkenau,
just the railways, just once.
But now we knew, we learned,
we discovered that t
he Pentagon knew,
the State Department knew...
Sixty years ago,
its human cargo -
nearly 1,000 Jews -
was turned back to Nazi Germany.
And that happened after the Kristallnacht,
after the first state sponsored pogrom,
with hundreds of Jews shop destroyed,
synagogues burned, thousands of people put in
concentration camps.
And that ship,
which was already in the shores of the United States,
was sent back.
I don't understand.
Roosevelt was a good man,
with a heart.
He understood those who need help.
Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark?
A thousand people - in America,
the great country, the greatest democracy,
the most generous of all new nations in modern history.
What happened?
I don't understand.
Why the indifference,
on the highest level,
to the suffering of the victims?''
[to be continued]
*
no response.
Indifference
is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end.
And therefore,
indifference is always the friend of the enemy,
for it benefits the aggressor -
never the victim,
whose pain is magnified
when he or she feels forgotten.
The political prisoner in his cell,
the hungry children,
the homeless refugees -
not to respond to their plight,
not to relive their solitude....
is to exile them from
human memory.
And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.
And this is one of the most important lessons
of this outgoing century's
wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.''
*
''In the place that I come from,
society was composed of three simple categories:
the killers,
the victimes,
and the
bystanders.
....in the death camps,
our only miserable consolation was that we believed
Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets,
that the leaders of the free world
did not know what was going on behind those
black gates and barbed wire;
that they had no knowledge of the war
against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought,
surely those leaders would have moved
heaven and earth to intervene.
They would have spoken out with
great outrage and conviction.
They would have bombed the railways to Birkenau,
just the railways, just once.
But now we knew, we learned,
we discovered that t
he Pentagon knew,
the State Department knew...
Sixty years ago,
its human cargo -
nearly 1,000 Jews -
was turned back to Nazi Germany.
And that happened after the Kristallnacht,
after the first state sponsored pogrom,
with hundreds of Jews shop destroyed,
synagogues burned, thousands of people put in
concentration camps.
And that ship,
which was already in the shores of the United States,
was sent back.
I don't understand.
Roosevelt was a good man,
with a heart.
He understood those who need help.
Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark?
A thousand people - in America,
the great country, the greatest democracy,
the most generous of all new nations in modern history.
What happened?
I don't understand.
Why the indifference,
on the highest level,
to the suffering of the victims?''
[to be continued]
*
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