Elie Wiesel - The Perils of Indifference (1999)

Holocaust¹ survivor² and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, gave this impassioned speech in the East Room of the White House on April 12, 1999, as part of the Millennium³ Lecture series, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.,In the summer of 1944, as a teenager in Hungary, Elie Wiesel, along with his father, mother and sisters, were deported⁴ by the Nazis⁶ to Auschwitz extermination⁷ camp in occupied Poland. Upon arrival there, Wiesel and his father were selected by SS Dr. Josef Mengele for slave labor⁸ and wound up at the nearby Buna rubber factory.,Daily life included starvation rations⁹ of soup and bread, brutal¹⁰ discipline, and a constant struggle against overwhelming despair. At one point, young Wiesel received 25 lashes¹¹ of the whip for a minor¹² infraction¹³.,In January 1945, as the Russian Army drew near, Wiesel and his father were hurriedly evacuated¹⁴ from Auschwitz by a forced march to Gleiwitz and then via an open train car to Buchenwald in Germany, where his father, mother, and a younger sister eventually died.,Wiesel was liberated¹⁵ by American troops in April 1945. After the war, he moved to Paris and became a journalist then later settled in New York. Since 1976, he has been Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. He has received numerous awards and honors including the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also the Founding Chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial. Wiesel has written over 40 books including Night, a harrowing chronicle of his Holocaust experiences, first published in 1960.,At the White House lecture, Wiesel was introduced by Hillary Clinton who stated, "It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity.",