Elie Wiesel's Speech Analysis

Indifferences and their Destructive Consequences Five years ago a teenage girl sat down in her high school English class and opened an assigned reading book. This book titled, Night, was written by one Elie Wiesel in the 60s, fifteen years after he was freed from Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp. This girl hated reading books she was told to read, she felt they were a damper on her free spirit. This book though, and what it taught her changed her life for the better. Elie Wiesel, a man of many titles spoke on April 12th, 1999 at the White House to an audience including President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. His speech was a part of the Millennium Lecture Series, speeches commemorating the past and idealizing what was to come in …show more content…
His first question is, “What is indifference” (6). He answers it with a dictionary-provided definition and then defines it with more simplistic terms. It is the shades of gray in life, the struggle of conforming caught up with the fight to be good. To some people this might not even be a problem, but to many people that struggle could live inside of them and is a constant reminder that, “to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman” (11). Knowing how thin that line could be is a motivator for those listening to Wiesel. He then asks the timeless question, “What about the children” (25). By appealing to the base instinct in every human being Wiesel makes his audience of government officials, professors, students, and anyone else that watched fear their consequences and want to change because they’ve seen the effects of indifference and don’t want innocent children to go through the same struggles as the children in war-torn countries. By questioning, Wiesel makes his audience