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The Perils of Indifference
Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 23:26:43 -0400 (EDT)
May 2, 2000
Dear All,
Today is Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance, a day to commemorate
the victims of the Holocaust. I have been wanting to share with you a
speech of Elie Wiesel, and today seemed like a very appropriate day. It
is entitled "The Perils of Indifference." You can read the speech at
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm, and listen to the speech
in its entirety (about 20 minutes) at
http://www.historyplace.com/sounds/presidents/thp-wiesel.ram.
With the school year nearing a close, I wanted to send a summary type
message. I have added many of you to this list since I sent out an
introductory e-mail in September, at the beginning of the school year, so
particularly for those of you who are relatively new to this list, I
wanted to send out an e-mail that expresses the theme of this list. Let
the following suffice.
The tone is somewhat more challenging -- perhaps that is the word, I
am not sure -- than most of the e-mails you have received from me. As you
read it, therefore, I ask that you bear in mind the things that will fill
in the vacuum that is the nothingness of indifference, things like caring
and compassion and love. To borrow a phrase from John Glenn, the flip
side of an indifferent world is a world in which the word "stranger"
translates into "a friend I have yet to meet."
Finally, for those of you who signed up for
better.world-list@pantheon.yale.edu, I apologize that that listserv never
got going. Perhaps we will try again later on...
And I thank you, friends, as always, for your time and tolerance of
these e-mails that you did not request.
Yours,
Eric
My family tree was indelibly sheared by the Holocaust. My father's
parents, my grandparents, were victims. They were also survivors. They
each had their own family on the eve of the Holocaust. Both were married;
my grandfather had two daughters. They had brothers and sisters, aunts
and uncles, cousins. At War's end, other than my grandmother's sister, as
well as a cousin who had already come to America, their families did not
survive.
The world said, "Never again." Never again would a man carry his
wife's red sweater with him for over two-and-a-half years in a death camp,
clinging to the hope that his wife was still alive, only to discard the
sweater, the hope, when he learned that she was dead. Never again would a
daughter dream that her dead mother cooked her a feast, so that the
daughter was not hungry when her captors sought to feed her soup laden
with invisible -- deadly -- ground glass.
My grandfather carried that sweater. That dream saved my
grandmother's life. Maybe "never again" is true. Maybe never again will a
husband manage to hold onto his wife's sweater over the course of years
during which he lives in a place where death, for many people, means
liberation. Maybe never again will a daughter's life be saved because her
dead mother cooks her a feast.
But I feel great anguish. For whether or not these incidents have
been repeated in the past 55 years, they certainly have had many
opportunities. We saw death camps in Bosnia. In Rwanda, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, Guatemala, East Timor, China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia - and I
shudder to know that this is but a partial list - we have seen the same
level of brutality and disdain for humanity that would lead some people to
give their starving prisoners vegetable soup - food at last! - only to
make that soup the instrument of a painful death.
"Never again." The hallowed words ring hollow. The world has time
and time again, perhaps while feeling pain, ultimately stood by in the
silence of indifference. Have we not learned? Did those we remember today
not die in vain? Did the crimes of the Holocaust - both the crimes of
hatred and the crimes of indifference - not cause the world to at last
reach within to find a richer understanding of life? Have we not learned
that we are part of a single humanity, that one human being can never
again be indifferent to the life of another human being?
It pains me that still, today, the awful silence of indifference
creates a vacuum through which, it seems, cries of pain do not travel.
The world was indifferent six years ago when genocide was taking place in
Rwanda, with a rate of death that exceeded that of the camps of the
Holocaust. The world was indifferent last year when tens of thousands of
people in Sierra Leone were having their hands and feet amputated in the
sick surgery of torture. Today, as every day, the world stands by - each
of us stands by - as tens of thousands of people, mostly young children,
die of malnutrition and easily preventable diseases. Today. Every day.
Never again?
We ask of the Holocaust: How could it have happened? What sort of
indifference, what sort of inhumanity, could have led to such suffering?
Will future generations ask the same of us?
Will future generations ask the same of me?
Will future generations ask the same of you?
Never again.
"I have only dreams: to build a better world, a world of harmony and
understanding, a world in which it is a joy to live. This is not asking
for too much." -- Yitzhak Rabin
Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 18:19:36 -0400 (EDT)
Dear All,
I have heard a bit of confusion about last night's note. To clear it
up -- the links were to Elie Wiesel's speech, one to the text and one
(which I would highly recommend) to a powerful audio version of the
speech. If any of you do not have internet access and would like to see
the speech, let me know. The note itself, in large part inspired by Elie
Wiesel's speech, was about the victims of the Holocaust that I most knew
and most love, my grandparents. I tried to put into words a memorial to
them.
Thank you,
Yours,
Eric
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