Elie Wiesel
Transcript: "The Perils of Indifference"
delivered 12 April 1999, Washington, D.C.
"In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great song. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. You may even at times respond to hatred. You fight it. You publicly criticize it. You disarm it.
Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy. It benefits the aggressor. It never benefits his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. Think of the political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees. Not to respond to their terrible condition, not to relieve their loneliness by offering them a spark of hope is to send them away from human memory. And in not seeing them as humans, we become less human, too.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.
And this is one of the most important lessons of this ending century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple groups. There were the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did."
Elie Wiesel held his Acceptance Speech on 10 December 1986, in the Oslo City Hall, Norway.
(The speech differs somewhat from the written speech.)
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
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