The Consequences of Being Indifferent
Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, describes indifference as “the most insidious danger of all” in his Nobel Peace Prize speech. Indifference is something that shouldn’t be acceptable, and nothing good had ever come from it. The effects of indifference are the benefit of the oppressor, the loss of all hope in the victims of injustice, as well as an increase in inhumanity of humankind.
. Many think that neutrality or indifference benefits no one. However, neutrality only benefits the oppressor. Neutrality is the equivalent to turning a blind eye on those who are suffering. Those who are indifferent are just as guilty as the oppressors, they are accomplices. Elie Wiesel states in his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech "We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere." Indifference worsens the victims suffering by giving them the feeling of being forgotten, and they lose all hope. The oppressed must be relieved from their suffering by being offered hope from someone who is not indifferent.
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Elie Wiesel states in his Perils of Indifference speech that as an effect of indifference the prisoners lost hope, faith in their God and they felt as if they were being punished. He says "We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger." In the book Night, Wiesel also tells how the world was silent, “Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that that deprived me of all eternity of the desire to live”, (34) and how his God was murdered, “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.”
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel changes immensely by the experiences he encounters on his journey through the ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps. These experiences alter his perspective and faith in humanity; consequently distorting his personality. At the beginning of the book, Wiesel is a religious and faithful teenager. He wants to expand his religious studies to mysticism and explore the Jewish religion as well. This begins to fade when he realizes that Jewish people, including babies and small children, are being burned in the crematorium and thrown into mass graves or holes in the ground. He also sees others being tortured and starved by the S.S officers. As a result, he begins to realize that if God was the divine
In the 1930s-1940s, the Nazis took millions of Jews into their death camps. They exterminated children, families, and even babies. Elie Wiesel was one of the few who managed to live through the war. However, his life was forever scarred by things he witnessed in these camps. The book Night explained many of the harsh feelings that Elie Wiesel experienced in his time in various German concentration camps. Prior to being taken, it is known that Wiesel was very strong in his beliefs of God and the ideas behind the Jewish religion. However, he questioned God while he endured the torture that the Nazis inflicted on many different races. He questioned why God had done this to these innocent people. Elie Wiesel lost much of his faith while in the
In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel remembers his time at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Elie begins to lose his faith in God after his faith is tested many times while at the concentration camp. Elie conveys to us how horrific events have changed the way he looks at his faith and God. Through comments such as, “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God, my soul, and turned my dreams into dust,” he reveals the toll that the Holocaust has taken on him. The novel begins during the years of 1942-1944 in Sighet, Transylvannia, Romania. Elie Wiesel and his family are deported and Elie is forced to live through many horrific events. Several events such as deportation, seeing dead bodies while at Auschwitz, and separation from his mother and sisters, make Elie start to question his absolute faith in God.
In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the author displays the transformation and the evolution of the average human being, through a horrible experience that he personally went through. When he is transported from one place to another, forced to leave everything behind, to go live in the ghettos, then in a horrible concentration camp. In the concentration camp Elie experiences numerous events that challenges his physical and mental limits. Some of these events made him question his faith, and whether there is such a thing as God, turning him from a conservative Jew to a reform Jew. Elie doesn’t love the concentration camps, yet he doesn’t hate it, in fact he does not care anymore. At a conference in 1986 Elie explains “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference”. (Elie Wiesel), meaning that opposite of love is not hate, it’s getting used to use to the situation, to the point that the person doesn’t care whether what is happening is right or wrong. In the novel Elie experience physical, mental, and spiritual pain, that test his humanity and morality.
Speeches are given for a purpose. Whether it is for persuasion, or education, or even entertainment, they all target certain parts of people’s minds. This speech, The Perils of Indifference, was given by Elie Wiesel with intention to persuade his audience that indifference is the downfall of humanity, and also to educate his audience about his conclusions about the Holocaust and the corresponding events. He was very successful in achieving those goals. Not only was the audience enlightened, but also President Bill Clinton, and the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, themselves were deeply touched by Wiesel’s words.
In the eyes of Elie Wiesel, author of Night, indifference whether it be in relationship abuse or another problem, is mentally damaging and needs to be eliminated. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel illustrates how indifference can harm the mind of the victim when he says, “Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live,” (Night 34). In this, Wiesel is speaking of his first night in Auschwitz. When he mentions silence he is referring to the indifference that the Jews in concentration camps faced from the rest of the world. Wiesel refers to that night as the time he lost his desire to live because he saw so much indifference toward the suffering of the inmates and the horrific things that were happening to them. After this, his desire to stay alive was destroyed because he watched as the world stood by, indifferent to the senseless murder of millions. Throught this, Wiesel illustrates that indifference will impact people for the rest of their lives. Because indifference
Inked on the pages of Elie Wiesel’s Night is the recounting of him, a young Jewish boy, living through the mass genocide that was the Holocaust. The words written so eloquently are full of raw emotions depict his journey from a simple Jewish boy to a man who was forced to see the horrors of the world. Within this time period, between beatings and deaths, Wiesel finds himself questioning his all loving and powerful God. If his God loved His people, then why would He allow such a terrible thing to happen? Perhaps Wiesel felt abandoned by his God, helpless against the will of the Nazis as they took everything from him.
To the people in the concentration camps, apathy is a “harsher punishment” (Wiesel) than anger or rage, because anger has feelings in it, while indifference just makes a suffering person feel even smaller and more insignificant. Indifference in humans potentially goes against religion, because it blurs the lines between “light and darkness” (Wiesel). Throughout his speech at the Millennium Lectures, Elie Wiesel both enlightens on the consequences of apathy towards those who need help, and inspires hope for a better future.
In conclusion, Wiesel loses his belief in God and religion by witnessing the murder of his people, and his family. Wiesel is symbolic of every survivor who experienced the dread of the Holocaust. Like most of the survivors, Wiesel wavered about religion and God, but completely lost it at the end of the Holocaust. For instance, my Great-Grandfather Ruben survived the Holocaust, but came out with a nonreligious way of life. In addition, it took Wiesel about ten years to write Night and he believes he has a moral obligation to, “try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory” (viii).
Oppression is the systematic method of prolonged cruelty and unjust treatment, often intended for those who are deemed “different” by a hierarchical society. It’s a basis that can be found in the plot of a fictional movie or novel, but most importantly, it’s an aspect of both past and modern life that has affected multiple nations. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, is a humanitarian who embodies the personal experiences of what being oppressed feels like – how it itches at one’s skin like the hatred and stares directed at them. The reason he is so important is because of his stories; what he has seen. The insight and intelligence he has brought forth further educates those who had previously accepted the world with their eyes closed.
In the final moments of Night, Elie has been broken down to only the most basic ideas of humanity; survival in it of itself has become the only thing left for him to cling to. After the chain of unfortunate events that led to his newfound solitude after his father’s abrupt death, Elie “thought only to eat. [He] thought not of [his] father, or [his] mother” (113). He was consumed with the ideas of survival, so he repeatedly only expressed his ideas of gluttony rather than taking the time to consider what happened to his family. The stress of survival allocated all of Elie’s energy to that cause alone. Other humanistic feelings like remorse, love, and faith were outcast when they seemed completely unimportant to his now sole goal of survival. The fading of his emotions was not sudden mishap though; he had been worn away with time. Faith was one of the most prominent key elements in Elie’s will to continue, but it faded through constant. During the hanging of a young boy Elie heard a man call to the crowd pleading, “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64). It snapped Elie’s resolve. From this point on, he brought up and questioned his faith on a regular basis. Afterwards, most other traits disappeared like steam after a fire is extinguished. Alone in the wet embers the will to survive kept burning throughout the heart ache. When all else is lost, humans try to survive for no reason other than to survive, and Wiesel did survive. He survived with mental scars that persisted the ten long years of his silence. Even now after his suffering has, Elie continues to constantly repeat the word never throughout his writing. To write his memoir he was forced to reopen the lacerations the strains of survival left inside his brain. He strongly proclaims, “Never shall I forget that night...Never shall I forget the smoke...Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the
Another typical characteristic of Wiesel’s pieces is employing logos as definition and description. Throughout The Perils of Indifference, Wiesel uses an extended and multifaceted definition of the term indifference. The author starts out by stating that “Etymologically, the word means ‘no difference’”, or in other words the most common definition of indifference is uniformity (The Perils of Indifference 1). Wiesel then further qualified this definition as an unfamiliar state of opposing ideas. Qualification. as known as clarification, of Wiesel’s definition of is vital to the development of Indifference in his piece is vital because it pinpoints exactly what the author want the audience to understand from his speech. By stating exactly what
”Lie down on it! On your belly! I obeyed. I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip. One! Two! He took time between the lashes. Ten eleven! Twenty-three. Twenty four, twenty five! It was over. I had not realized it, but I fainted” (Wiesel 58). It was hard to imagine that a human being just like Elie Wiesel would be treating others so cruelly. There are many acts that Elie has been through with his father and his fellow inmates. Experiencing inhumanity can affect others in a variety of ways. When faced with extreme inhumanity, The people responded by becoming incredulous, losing their faith, and becoming inhumane themselves.
Night is a dramatic book that tells the horror and evil of the concentration camps that many were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout the book the author Elie Wiesel, as well as many prisoners, lost their faith in God. There are many examples in the beginning of Night where people are trying to keep and strengthen their faith but there are many more examples of people rebelling against God and forgetting their religion.