Dzungar, Circassian, Armenians, Holodomor, Jewish, Cambodians, Rwandan and Darfur. All too many genocides. When will it stop? When will we learn? When will we stop forgetting about the past and when will the history books end the patterns of genocide? When? The survivors share their stories, but do we listen?
Elie Wiesel was a fifteen-year-old boy with a life ahead of him, when his religion; following Judaism, made him a target in Adolf Hitler's extermination plans. He had done nothing wrong, yet he was attacked. From Auschwitz to Birkenau to Buna to Gleiwitz and Gleiwitz to Buchenwald, Wiesel endured separation and starvation, to eventually survive the brutality of the Jewish Holocaust that left millions of others dead. In his book, Night, …show more content…
If you truly understand the horror of these acts then you can not turn your cheek from the genocides occurring now. For example, right now in Darfur, a region in western Sudan, Arab militias are carrying out genocide by burning villages, as well as murdering, raping, and torturing civilians. To put into words the horrors of genocide always seems as if it is an inequity to what the survivors actually endured, but to put no words the events, to revert to silence, and to pretend that it did not happen just makes us ignorant to them. As the numbers Holocaust survivors slowly fall, their testimonies are all that remain, but their words will be forgotten if we do not make an effort to continue their activism. Once this is recognized what do we do next? Having not experienced the event ourselves, how do we express the severity to others? The answer is simple, we just share the stories. We tell the world about Wiesel. We can only attempt to put ourselves in his shoes when he was separated from his mother and sister, stripped of everything, including his name becoming A-7713 instead of Eliezer and watching his father die of dysentery, but since he can no longer tell his own story we must do it instead. Our voices can still ring through the ears of the world. It is our duty to stop the repetition of history, we owe it to Wiesel and all other victims of
Elie Wiesel was a fifteen-year-old boy with a life ahead of him, when his religion; following Judaism, made him a target in Adolf Hitler's extermination plans. He had done nothing wrong, yet he was attacked. From Auschwitz to Birkenau to Buna to Gleiwitz and Gleiwitz to Buchenwald, Wiesel endured separation and starvation, to eventually survive the brutality of the Jewish Holocaust that left millions of others dead. In his book, Night, …show more content…
If you truly understand the horror of these acts then you can not turn your cheek from the genocides occurring now. For example, right now in Darfur, a region in western Sudan, Arab militias are carrying out genocide by burning villages, as well as murdering, raping, and torturing civilians. To put into words the horrors of genocide always seems as if it is an inequity to what the survivors actually endured, but to put no words the events, to revert to silence, and to pretend that it did not happen just makes us ignorant to them. As the numbers Holocaust survivors slowly fall, their testimonies are all that remain, but their words will be forgotten if we do not make an effort to continue their activism. Once this is recognized what do we do next? Having not experienced the event ourselves, how do we express the severity to others? The answer is simple, we just share the stories. We tell the world about Wiesel. We can only attempt to put ourselves in his shoes when he was separated from his mother and sister, stripped of everything, including his name becoming A-7713 instead of Eliezer and watching his father die of dysentery, but since he can no longer tell his own story we must do it instead. Our voices can still ring through the ears of the world. It is our duty to stop the repetition of history, we owe it to Wiesel and all other victims of