Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke,Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewishboy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far fromGoethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald.He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought therenever would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers theirrage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he willalways be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion.Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what heneeded to know -- that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President -- Commander-in-Chiefof the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others -- and I amfilled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines thehumanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary -- or Mrs.Clinton -- for what you said, and for what you are doing for children inthe world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victimsof destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. Whatwill the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be rememberedin the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, inboth moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadowover humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chainof assassinations -- Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin-- bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland andRwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in thegulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course,Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference."A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light anddarkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion,good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy?Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly viewindifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simplyto keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine,as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive.It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier toavoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is,after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's painand despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighborare of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Theirhidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reducesthe other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragicof all prisoners were the "Muselmanner," as they were called.Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staringvacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to theirsurroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing.They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned byhumanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by Godwas worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferentone. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be avictim of His anger. Man can live far from God -- not outside God. Godis wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the humanbeing inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger andhatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a greatsymphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because oneis angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is nevercreative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. Youdenounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifferenceis not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifferenceis always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- neverhis victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. Thepolitical prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees-- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offeringthem a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denyingtheir humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And thisis one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-rangingexperiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simplecategories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkestof times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and I'm glad that Mrs.Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period,that we are now in the Days of Remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned,forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitzand Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the freeworld did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbedwire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler'sarmies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heavenand earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage andconviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, justthe railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew,the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White Housethen, who was a great leader -- and I say it with some anguish and pain,because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death -- Franklin DelanoRoosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to meand to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American peopleand the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiantand brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship,to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless,his image in Jewish history -- I must say it -- his image in Jewish historyis flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty yearsago, its human cargo -- maybe 1,000 Jews -- was turned back to Nazi Germany.And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsoredpogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousandsof people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was alreadyon the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understoodthose who needed help. Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark?A thousand people -- in America, a great country, the greatest democracy,the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened?I don't understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to thesuffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy.Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the "Righteous Gentiles,"whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why werethey so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers afterthe war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America's largest corporations continue to do businesswith Hitler's Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented,that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France withoutoil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumaticcentury: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth ofIsrael on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel's peace treatywith Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting,filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President,convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States andNATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, thosewho were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, shouldbe charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was notsilent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean thatsociety has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and morehuman? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitiveto the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injusticesin places near and far? Is today's justified intervention in Kosovo, ledby you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation,the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere inthe world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do thesame?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read aboutthem in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is alwaysthe most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. Wesee their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain,their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.Some of them -- so many of them -- could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the CarpathianMountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout theseyears of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium,carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel - April 12, 1999