Summary Of Elie Wiesel's The Perils Of Indifference

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“Society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders,” Elie Wiesel stated in his “The Perils of Indifference” speech given on April 12, 1999, at the White House. In his speech, Wiesel discusses the indifference that the Jewish people experienced during the Holocaust. Weisel was taken by the Nazis in 1944 at the age of 15 and spent about a year in various concentration camps, including Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. Throughout his time in concentration camps, Elie witnessed the cruelty between strangers, and even sometimes between friends and family. Elie explains to the audience the dangers of being indifferent in “The Perils of Indifference”.
First, Wiesel’s speech explains that indifference was present due to the selfishness surrounding the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Wiesel explains the attitude of the people around him in “The Perils of Indifference”. “Yet for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And therefore, their lives are meaningless,” he says. This quotation of Wiesel’s speech allows the reader to understand that people that have known each other for their entire lives left them stranded when they needed them most. People who were not affected by the persecution of the Jewish people didn’t care or try to stop what was happening. It also relates to when they were in the concentration camps and the way people treated each other. In Elie’s book, Night, he explains specific instances of this. In fact, of these instances is when a young boy attacks and kills his own father for a small crust of bread. The father cries, “Meir, my little Meir! Don’t you recognize me… You’re killing your father… I have bread… for you too… for you too…” just before his son kills him. The terrible conditions of the concentration camps made people act crazy and selfish. People were even willing to make their families perish for the sake of themselves. In the concentration camps it was every man for himself, and it did not matter who got
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Wiesel recounts how ignorance is worse than a negative emotion. He states, “Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred.” Being ignorant does nothing to resolve a conflict, whereas putting an emotion towards a problem, tends to make people fight back. Indifference allows the enemy to just walk all over the people that they are harming, because no one is willing to recognize the terrible actions towards the Jewish people. In relation,Wiesel also notes in his speech, “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.” Ignorance of those who are not being affected makes the enemy stronger and the victim weaker, because even if people don’t mean to, silence is often interpreted as support to the enemy. If no one is stopping Hitler and the Nazis, how would there be an end to the persecution of the Jewish people? No one can stop Hitler if not a single person is willing to truly recognize what was truly happening. Lastly, in The Voices of the Holocaust, the poem “First they came...” by Martin Niemöller explains the attitude of the bystanders watching their friends and neighbors being taken away. The poem explains how the Nazis came for specific groups at a time, and no

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