The Perils of Indifference

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."
The entire speech on audio is attached to this link:
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm

Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity 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 in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.

This is the speech Wiesel gave at the Clinton White house, the Millenium lectures
and he defines indifference with peculiar appropriateness:

We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations -- Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin -- bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag 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 and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.

Among harrowing upheavals, indifference can be seductive to turn away one's face from the immensity of an evil world. Indifference reduces us all to abstractions in our own minds. The indifferent person leads a meaningless life . Behind the black gates of Auschwitz Wiesel describes the Muselmanner lying on the ground with a vacant stare. Eliot wrote of creatures called the Hollow Men, reminiscent of this image that I conjure up into my own mind of the living dead who do not even know they are dead.

Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. 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. Man can live far from God -- not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.

Abandonment worse than punishment? The turning away of God's face from the suffering of this world yet suffering with Jewry in the exile of their abominations . He went with them in exile.

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 symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

I must comment on the depth of his words. This is the worst part of our revolting inhumanity to our fellow man our indifference born of a gulf, an insentivity and dvirocement from the pain of our fellow man and his creatures and world. We are all of us guilty of degrees of this inhumanity as it were.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

I like the way Wiesel equates indifference benefiting the aggressor and aggrieves the victim in feeling more forgotten. Not to respond to their pathos and grief by acting upon their grief is a betrayal of our own humanity .To exile them from human memory is the worst abomination one human can perform. By failing to act, each man has acted in abominattion.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.

If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the 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 House then, who was a great leader -- and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.

I must comment with an anger unspeakable that Auschwitz and Treblinka were not closely guarded secrets and that our government leaders knew of the blackest hour of those camps and never bombed the railways leading to Birkenau. Are we to believe that this darkness at the depth of our soul is not present and can recur again and again? We,too many of us knew these horrors and could not use the excuse,"I did not know" as too many of us did know and turned our faces away in most cases.

He makes the further comment that FDR's image in Jewish history is flawed because this indifference, insensitivity to the suffering of others endangering us all, is so glaringly obvious.

The depressing tale of the St Louis-Indifference at the highest level note the quote
below:

The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo -- maybe 1,000 Jews -- was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.

I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those 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 the suffering of the victims?

Why were the righteous gentiles so few ? Why did America's largest corporations do business with Hitler's Germany til l942?
The good things that happened in the wake of the war,its aftermath were paltry and pale and anemic side by side the horrific horrors of the War, and will not stop the future landslide of the evil that continues in the wake of the war. The good just is not concerted enough . The good just isn't good enough and the innocent pay for the indifference of the large numbers time and again. Mankind at large does not want to listen and learn from these lessons.

Transcript of the millenium talk given by Elie Wiesel at the Clinton White House:
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel-transcript.htm
Voices on antisemitism
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/transcript/index.php?content=20070524

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/643360/Elie-Wiesel