![]() ![]() His mother and younger sister were murdered right upon their arrival to that “other planet”. In April 1944, all of them were sent to the accursed death camp of Auschwitz. 14,000 prayers filled the synagogues, including men, women and children. Prayers could be heard from over 30 synagogues throughout the town. During the prosperous year of the community, the Jews left their mark on every aspect of the town’s life: shops, markets, and fairs were all shut down on Shabbat. His parents had a small grocery store in the city of Sighet in north Romania, at the bottom of the Carpathian Mountains, not far from “Goethe’s beloved Weimar”. It is with great pain and reserved anger that he mentions the miserable American decision to deny the Saint Louis refugees ship, which brought a thousand Jewish refugees to the shores of America – and send them back to the burning shores of Europe, where most of them perished by the Nazis later on.Įlie Wiesel at the age of 15, months before the deportation to AuschwitzĮli Wiesel was born 89 years ago to an orthodox Jewish family. Wiesel is not afraid to harshly criticize the Unites States, even when speaking as the White House’s guest of honor. It’s power lies in the combination of phenomenal rhetoric, shocking historical truths, a call for political and social action, and of course, the unique stirring personal story of the speaker. It entered the “20 th century hundred most important speeches” list by the prestigious magazine American Rhetoric, considered to be the most quoted speech in media faculties in the universities of Texas and Wisconsin, and is used until today as an educational text in Holocaust teaching in the Unites States’ public schools. Little did they know that Elie Wiesel’s speech was to become one of the world’s most famous speeches. In April 1999, The President of the United States Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary invited distinguished intellectuals to speak in a series of speeches held in the White House on the occasion of the turn of the millennium. However, as the historian Simon Sabag Montefiore stated in his preface to the bestseller “Speeches that Changed the World”: “For me, the best speech is one that marks no great event but merely pinpoints with splendid language, moral rigor, and righteous fury, the essence of all decent civilization: Elie Wiesel’s millennium address on “the perils of indifference”. Sure, there were more charismatic orators such as Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler or Charles de Gaulle, and more famous speeches than his, such as “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King or the unforgettable last words by King Charles I before his execution. These were the opening words of “The Perils of Indifference” by Elie Wiesel – a holocaust survivor, author, philosopher and intellectual. “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.”
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