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

The Forgotten

From Publishers Weekly
Nobel Peace Prize winner Wiesel ( Sages and Dreamers ) reprises the themes of memory and forgetting in this almost unbearably moving novel. Elhanan Rosenbaum, one of the few Jews in his Romanian village to have survived WW II, is a widower whose adored wife died giving birth to their only child. Decades later, he is losing his memory to an unspecified illness. Horrified at the possibility that all he has witnessed will be surrendered to oblivion, he entrusts his life's story--and the stories of the people he alone remembers--to his son, Malkiel, a reporter for the New York Times . At Elhanan's request, Malkiel travels to the Carpathian mountains to explore the mysteries that still confound his father. There he pores over the tombstones in the Jewish cemetery, the legacy of a once-thriving community, and meets the gravedigger. In one of the most poignant passages in an already tender novel, the gravedigger tells the story of the Great Reunion: as the Nazis deport the last Jews, the ghosts of the village's rabbinical judges convene to avenge the fate of their now-extinct congregation. Malkiel begins to comprehend the relations between memory and grace, courage and forgiveness. Here and there a sentence sinks into sentimentality ("Twenty years of sun, laughter, a free and savage joy, were inscribed on her fine and angular Oriental face"), but the integrity of Wiesel's respect for history and his recognition of its fragility give this novel an impact simple in its strength and complex in its dimensions.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
This novel of the memories of a Holocaust survivor adds substantially to Wiesel's collection of more than 30 works--including essays, plays, cantatas, and novels--in some way related to the destruction of European Jewry. Wiesel's concise, haunting, stark imagery has earned him the title of literary laureate of the Holocaust. Here, survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum, now living in New York and a distinguished professor with a psychiatric practice, is tragically losing his prodigious memory. While he can still remember, he creates a "backup" by bequeathing to his son, Malkiel, his stories of the martyred death of his father in his Carpathian village (for whom his son is named); his teenage stint in the army and his return to a ghetto empty of Jews; his adventures in the underground partisan movement; and his love of Talia, the extraordinary woman who rescued him and who died giving birth to his only son. These searing tales, which spur Malkiel on a search of collective past, succesfully link generations together. Wiesel's substantial readership will appreciate the introspection and search for truth in this new work. Recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.
The above review from Amazon is on Wiesel's book The Forgotten
Here's the link http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Elie-Wiesel/dp/0805210199/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233467885&sr=1-7

Mormon youth a hero of WWII

This is the story of a Mormon youth and hero who defied the NAzi Regime. The wikpedia article is accurate.to my knowledge. His name was Helmuth Hubener.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_H%C3%BCbener
I give you his story

Helmuth Hübener was once a Boy Scout, but after the organization was suppressed by the Nazis, he belonged to the Hitler Youth, although he was not always comfortable with its drilling, nor did he find Kristallnacht to his liking. When the church congregation to which he belonged undertook to bar Jews from its religious services, Hübener found himself repelled by the new policy.


Helmuth Hübener, flanked by Rudolf Wobbe (left) and Karl-Heinz SchnibbeAfter Hübener finished middle school in 1941, he began an apprenticeship in administration at the Hamburg Social Authority (Sozialbehörde). He met other apprentices there, some of them with a communist family background, and they got him listening to enemy radio broadcasts, which was strictly forbidden in Nazi Germany, being considered a form of treason. In the summer of that same year, Hübener began listening to the BBC by himself, and used what he had heard to compose various anti-fascist texts and anti-war leaflets, of which he also made many copies. The leaflets were designed to bring to people's attention how skewed the official reports about World War II from Berlin were, and also to point out Adolf Hitler's, Joseph Goebbels's, and other leading Nazis' criminal behaviour. Other themes covered by Hübener's writings were the war's futility, and Germany's looming defeat. He also mentioned the mistreatment sometimes meted out in the Hitler Youth.

In the autumn of 1941, he managed to involve three of his friends in his unlawful listening, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudolf Wobbe, who were later also co-workers, and later Gerhard Düwer as well. Hübener also had them help him distribute about 60 different pamphlets, all containing material from the British broadcasts, and all consisting of typewritten copies. They distributed them all over Hamburg, using such methods as surreptitiously pinning them on bulletin boards, sticking them through letterboxes, and stuffing them in coat pockets.[1]

On February 5, 1942, Helmuth Hübener was arrested by the Gestapo at his workplace at the Hamburger Bieberhaus. While trying to translate the pamphlets into French, and trying to have them distributed among prisoners of war, he had been noticed by a Nazi Party member, Heinrich Mohn, who had denounced him. (Mohn was jailed after the war, but freed by the Bundesgerichtshof by the early 1950s).

On 11 August 1942, Hübener's case was tried at the Volksgerichtshof in Berlin, and on 27 October, at the age of 17, he was beheaded by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.[1] His two friends, Schnibbe and Wobbe, who had also been arrested, were given lengthy prison sentences of five and ten years respectively.


Volksgerichtshof's proclamation from 27 October 1942 announcing Hübener's executionAs it says in the proclamation (at right), Hübener was found guilty of conspiracy to commit high treason and treasonous furthering of the enemy's cause. He was sentenced not only to death, but also to permanent loss of his civil rights.

It was highly unusual, even for the Nazis, to try an underaged defendant, much less sentence him to death, but the court stated that Hübener had shown more than average intelligence for a boy his age. This, along with his general and political knowledge, and his behaviour before the court, made Hübener, in the court's eyes, a boy with a far more developed mind than was usually to be found in someone of his age. For this reason, the court stated, Hübener was to be punished as an adult.

Hübener's lawyers and his mother appealed for clemency in his case, hoping to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The Berlin Gestapo did as well. In their eyes, the fact that Hübener had confessed fully and shown himself to be still morally uncorrupted were points in Hübener's favour. The Reich Youth Leadership (Reichsjugendführung) would have none of it, however. They said that the danger posed by Hübener's activities to the German people's war effort made the death penalty necessary. On 27 October 1942, the Nazi Ministry of Justice upheld the Volksgerichtshof's verdict. Hübener was only told of the Ministry's decision at 1:05 p.m. on the scheduled day of execution and beheaded at 8:13 p.m.

A youth centre and a pathway in Hamburg are nowadays named for Helmuth Hübener. The latter runs between Greifswalder Straße and Kirchenweg in Sankt Georg. At the former Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, an exhibit about young Helmuth Hübener's resistance, trial, and execution is located in the former guillotine chamber, where floral tributes are often placed in memory of Hübener and others put to death by the Nazis there.

Hübener was arrested by German authorities and two days later was excommunicated by local authorities of the LDS Church. When the Church leadership in the U.S. were informed of the excommunication, they revoked it. Hübener was posthumously reinstated in the LDS Church in 1946, with the note "excommunicated by mistake,"[2] because the specific process required for excommunication from the LDS Church was not followed by Hübener's local church leaders at the time.

His arrest was in connection to his political and anti-Nazi activities. Because of some of the local church leaders' political actions at the time of his excommunication it is most often seen as the reason why he was excommunicated. Some branch leaders allowed political broadcasts during some church meetings and refused to allow Jews to attend meetings. This was done to show that members were good German citizens. One of Hübener's local church leaders, Otto Berndt, was sympathetic to Hübener, and was suspected of having assisted and encouraged the boy. Berndt was questioned and released with an ominous warning: "after Jews, Mormons will be next."

Hübener's story has been the subject of various literary, dramatic, and cinematic works. In 1969, German author Günter Grass wrote the book Örtlich betäubt ("Local anesthetic"), later translated into English, about the Hübener group.[4]

Brigham Young University professor Thomas Rogers wrote a play titled "Hübener," which has had several runs in various venues. Schnibbe attended some of the performances on the BYU campus.

Hübener's story was also documented in the 2003 movie, Truth & Conviction, written and directed by Rick McFarland and Matt Whitaker. The movie, later released on DVD, was sponsored by the BYU College of Humanities.[5]

The book Hübener vs. Hitler; A Biography of Helmuth Hübener, Mormon Teenage Resistance Leader, by Richard Lloyd Dewey, was published by Stratford Books, Provo, UT/Arlington, VA in December 2003, Revised 2nd edition published October 2004. It is a biography written in a popular-historical style, and includes interviews with friends and relatives of Hübener, and utilizes primary documents from the Nazi regime that investigated his case.

When Truth Was Treason is a first-hand account by Karl Schnibbe (Hübener's co-resistance fighter), with editing by Blair R. Holmes, a professional historian, and Alan F. Keele, a German-language specialist. This monograph was published in 1995 by University of Illinois Press, with new publishing rights, theatrical rights, and copyright transferred 2003 to Academic Research Foundation.

The Boy Who Dared, by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, a historical biography for middle school readers that is based on Hübener's life, was published in February 2008. Bartoletti's earlier Newbery Honor book, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow (2005), covers Hübener's story as well.[6]

Truth & Treason is a major motion picture based on the Hübener Group. Filming begins in Budapest, Hungary Spring / Summer 2009. Haley Joel Osment has been cast as Helmuth Hübener. The script is by Ethan Vincent and Matt Whitaker who is also the director. The film is being produced by Russ Kendall & Micah Merrill of Kaleidoscope Pictures along with Whitaker.