[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 52 (Thursday, April 15, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E669-E670]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


  NOBEL LAUREATE ELIE WIESEL TEACHES ABOUT THE TRAGEDY OF INDIFFERENCE

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, April 15, 1999

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, few Americans more epitomize the nobility of 
America's moral strength than Dr. Elie Wiesel, the 1986 recipient of 
the Nobel Peace Prize and a survivor of the Holocaust. Elie has devoted 
his life to ensuring that the tragedy of his youth is never again 
repeated. His passionate and unyielding defense of human rights is a 
model to all of us.
  Last Monday night, Elie Wiesel spoke at the White House at a 
Millennium Evening Forum including President and Mrs. Clinton and an 
audience of distinguished guests. His speech--``The Perils of 
Indifference: Lessons Learned From A Violent Century''--eloquently 
describes the most lasting moral peril of the Holocaust nightmare: the 
apathy of those who sat silently while millions were slaughtered by 
Nazi Germany. As reports of Hitler's atrocities mounted during the late 
1930's and early 1940's, corporations continued to conduct business 
with the Third Reich, refugees were denied admission to a host of 
nations, tragically including to the United States, and free peoples 
refused to act to stop Hitler's killing machine.
  Without such passive disregard for human life, many of the six 
million victims of the Holocaust might have lived. ``In a way, to be 
indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman,'' 
explained Dr. Wiesel, ``Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than 
anger and hatred.''
  The reflections of Elie Wiesel are particularly significant given the 
ongoing war crimes of Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian government 
against untold thousands of Kosovar Albanians. Elie acknowledged the 
undeniable moral character of NATO's military campaign against these 
outrageous human rights atrocities, and he pointed out the sharp 
contrast with the world's reaction during the Holocaust: ``This time, 
the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we 
intervene.''
  Mr. Speaker, Elie Wiesel is right. America must remain committed to 
military campaign to help the suffering Albanian victims of Milosevic's 
brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosova. We must also maintain 
our commitment to fight against human rights abuses throughout the 
world.
  Dr. Elie Wiesel is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities 
at Boston University. In addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, he has been 
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States 
Congressional God Medal, and the Medal of Liberty Award. Elie's talents 
as a teacher, author, and orator have enlightened generations of 
students and citizens for nearly five decades.
  Mr. Speaker, as we mark the Days of Remembrance this week, I urge my 
colleagues to read carefully the thoughtful reflections of Dr. Elie 
Wiesel.

  The Perils of Indifference: Lessons Learned From a Violent Century, 
        Remarks at Millennium Evening, The White House, April 12

       Mr. WIESEL. Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of 
     Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: 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.
       And now, I stand before you, Mr. President--Commander-in-
     Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of 
     others--and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude 
     to the American people.
       Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what 
     defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to 
     you, Hillary--or Mrs. Clinton--for what you said, and for 
     what you are doing for children in the world, for the 
     homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of 
     destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
       We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. 
     What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will 
     it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be 
     judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical 
     terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: 
     two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of 
     assassinations--Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, 
     Sadat, Rabin--bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and 
     Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo 
     and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of 
     Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz 
     and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
       What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means ``no 
     difference.'' A strange and unnatural state in which the 
     lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime 
     and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
       What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a 
     philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference 
     conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? 
     Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's 
     sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, 
     as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
       Of course, indifference can be tempting--more than that, 
     seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It 
     is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our 
     work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, 
     troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and 
     despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her 
     neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives 
     are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of 
     no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an 
     abstraction.
       Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most 
     tragic of all prisoners were the ``Muselmanner,'' as they 
     were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit 
     or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of 
     who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They 
     no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. 
     They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
       Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be 
     abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that 
     to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. 
     Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be 
     ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim 
     of His anger; Man can live far from God--not outside God. God 
     is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
       In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes 
     the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more 
     dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be 
     creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, have 
     done something special for the sake of humanity because one 
     is angry at the injustice that 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 his 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 relieve 
     their solitude by offering them a spark of hope 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 victims, and the 
     bystanders. During the darkest of times inside the ghettoes 
     and death camps--and I'm glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned 
     that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that 
     we are now in the Days of Remembrance--but then, we felt 
     abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
       And our only miserable consolation was that we believed 
     that 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 Jews that Hitler's 
     armies and their accomplices waged as part 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 leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just 
     once.
       And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the 
     Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious 
     occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader--and 
     I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is 
     exactly 54 years marking his death--Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
     died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to 
     me and to us.
       No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American 
     people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds 
     and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to 
     fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so 
     many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, 
     his image in Jewish history--I must say it--his image in 
     Jewish history is flawed.
       The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. 
     Sixty years ago, its human cargo--maybe 1,000 Jews--was 
     turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the 
     Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with 
     hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, 
     thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that 
     ship, which was already on 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

[[Page E670]]

     needed help. Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark? 
     A thousand people--in America, a 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?
       But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our 
     tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the 
     ``Righteous Gentiles,'' whose selfless acts of heroism saved 
     the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there 
     a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to 
     save their victims during the war?
       Why did some of America's largest corporations continue to 
     do business with Hitler's Germany until 1942? It has been 
     suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could 
     not have conducted its invasion of France without oil 
     obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their 
     indifference?
       And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this 
     traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of 
     communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the 
     demise of apartheid, Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, the 
     peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, 
     filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that 
     you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here 
     and I will never forget it.
       And then, of course, the joint decision of the United 
     States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those 
     victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man 
     whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged 
     with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was 
     not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we 
     intervene.
       Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it 
     mean that society has changed? Has the human being become 
     less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from 
     our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of 
     victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in 
     places near and far? Is today's justified intervention in 
     Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that 
     never again will the deportation, the terrorization of 
     children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? 
     Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the 
     same?
       What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we 
     read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken 
     heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When 
     adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their 
     eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their 
     agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, 
     famine. Some of them--so many of them--could be saved.
       And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from 
     the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I 
     have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And 
     together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by 
     profound fear and extraordinary hope.

     

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