According to Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the Holocaust was partly caused by the world staying silent. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the injustices committed by the Nazis is shown though Wiesel’s firsthand experience of the Holocaust in several concentration camps. This in addition to the documentary Bully, which shows how ignorance of everyday injustices may lead to dangerous consequences, implies that silence is not acceptable in these types of situations. Although it may be easier to remain unheard and stay silent, it is best to speak up for others who cannot do so themselves because of the threatening results of ignorance. Lack of interference with a problem will typically end in the situation becoming worse …show more content…
However, this lack of interest caused by the belief that silence is commonplace will lead to devastating circumstances. In Night, for instance, ignorance becomes the norm in the concentration camps. This is shown during the evacuation of Buna, when people ignore those in need of assistance and trample over them. With the march lasting for quite a while and the men being as weak as they were, many people were lost. If the men had treated those in critical condition, not as many people would have been lost. Moreover, in Bully, the lack of concern regarding those being hassled may end in suicide, as is the case for Ty Field-Smalley, a young boy who took his life after being harassed at school. The staff and fellow classmates of Smalley took no interest towards his welfare, likely because of their lack of time or for their lack of understanding of what was happening. Through their silence, a middle schooler was brought to the point of committing suicide, showing that ignorance does not necessarily end in bliss. Despite the general acceptance about ignorance being a natural response to the unsightly parts of the world, the silence towards those in need will ultimately end
Night by Elie Wiesel remains a shocking and terrifying memoir of a survivor of the Holocaust, the murders of six million Jews and five million Gentiles. Elie, a victim of this dreadful event, was forced to separate from his family, and to miss the life he once had. Elie transformed into a unrecognizable, scarred person by the end of his journey. Elie’s traumatizing experiences in the concentration camps of Auschwitz affected him significantly; he changed both spiritually and in his relationship with his father.
He was finally free, no joy filled his heart but abandonment was drowning it. How dangerous is indifference to humankind as it pertains to suffering and the need for conscience understanding when people are faced with unjust behaviors? Elie Wiesel is an award winning author and novelist who has endured and survived hardships. One of the darkest times in history, a massacre of over six million Jews, the Holocaust and Hitler himself. After the Holocaust he went on and wrote the internationally acclaimed memoir “Night,” in which he spoke out against persecution and injustice across the world. In the compassionate yet pleading speech, ¨Perils of Indifference,¨ Elie Wiesel analyzes the injustices that himself and others endured during the twentieth century, as well as the hellish acts of the Holocaust through effective rhetorical choices.
Holocaust Survivor, Elie Wiesel, in his speech, “The Perils of Indifference” (1999), advises that having an apathetic attitude to a situation is dangerous a society in need of help. He supports his claim by gaining credibility from his audience and uses imagery to help, then addresses briefly about his past life and an example of when indifference occurred, and finally, throws everything that transpired in the past and hints what we can do differently in the future. Wiesel’s purpose is to urge the audience to not be indifferent to what is happening around the world, but to see how society could all help. Throughout the speech, there are a few different tones such as gratuitous, passive, and grateful for his audience to make a change.
Elie Wiesel’s speech falls into the deliberative genre category, and was designed to influence his listeners into action by warning them about the dangers indifference can have on society as it pertains to human atrocities and suffering. The speech helped the audience understand the need for every individual to exercise their moral conscience in the face of injustice. Wiesel attempts to convince his audience to support his views by using his childhood experience and relating them to the harsh realities while living in Nazi Death Camps as a boy during the Holocaust. He warns, “To be indifferent to suffering is to lose one’s humanity” (Wiesel, 1999). Wiesel persuades the audience to embrace a higher level of level moral awareness against indifference by stating, “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”. Wiesel’s uses historical narrative, woven with portions of an autobiography to move his persuasive speech from a strictly deliberative genre to a hybrid deliberative genre.
Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel in his formal speech,”The Perils of Indifference,” asserts that indifference has causes all tragedy in the past, present, and will continue to terrorize humanity in the future if we do not stop it. He develops his message through examples of what indifference specifically causes. Any wars or serious events like Kennedy’s assassination, WW I&II, etc. He describes these as “failures” that “cast” a “dark shadow” over “humanity” (par. 5). Also, Wiesel shares personal anecdotes in order to give his specific point of view at the scene of something like the Holocaust. His story with the “Muselmanner” illustrates that these prisoners were left to die in the corner of buildings and they eventually “stared vacantly into space” and they were “dead” but “they did not know it.” Ultimately, he ends with his prospects of the future. He hopes that humans abolish indifference for the sake of their own humanity. Wiesel’s purpose is to ultimately warn his audience into stopping the progression of indifference in order to stop the growth of foreign and domestic hostility. He establishes a serious tone for readers by using stylistic devices and rhetorical devices such as repetition, pathos, and rhetorical questions in order to develop his message that the inhumanity of indifference and the importance of resistance is still relevant today.
There are many vices that are taken up exclusively by Humans. Other animals don’t think about wiping out entire races or species just for kicks, most species don’t have the urge to attempt genocide or even turning on their own kin, but humans do. Elie Wiesel was a holocaust survivor whose ghastly year at the Auschwitz death camp was shared with the world by way of his book, “Night.”
In “Night,” the setting creates a cruel and depressing mood which helps the reader feel what it was like to live during the Holocaust. For example in chapter one he uses descriptive words that make it seem like the Nazis think that the Jewish people didn’t deserve a life. Once the Jewish get to the concentration camps the writing said “They were forced to dig huge trenches then they shot the prisoners” (Wiesel 6). That quote is saying that they were forced to dig their own grave when they arrived at the concentration camps, and then got shot and placed in the grave that they had just dug. In the writing i get the feeling that the Nazis thought the Jews were evil people because of the way they named the street that they lived on. In the text
Through his first-person memoir Night, Elie Wiesel reveals that people experience changes in their attitude as they become products of their environments.
In the novel “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor suggests that when humans are faced with protecting their own mortality, they abandon their morals and values. This can be seen in both the Jewish and German people. The German’s are inhumanely cruel to protect their own jobs and safely by obeying government commands. The Jewish captives lost their morals as they fight to survive the concentration camps. Elie Wiesel encountered many obstacles that made many of his ideals changed drastically for Wiesel which was his loss in humanity throughout the book he explains the many ways he does not see people as people anymore. He also explains how all of his natural human rights were no more during the time in the Holocaust. He had to find a sense of self because he could have easily fallen apart. He could not have done anything different, he knew it was going to end poorly. Silence is a very important and prominent theme in this book as silence represents many key symbols such as. God’s silence: Eliezar questions God’s faith many times throughout this book and wonders how he could just sit there and be silent while people are mass murdering people.
Yet those who did not accept their fate, took control of their own destiny during the Holocaust. These heroic individuals never had indifferences and took matters into their own hands. Three teens know as “The White Rose” decided to spread the word of possible “freedom by creating and distributing pamphlet”(“PROTEST OF YOUTH”). Yet upon the guards discovering of their plans, they were sentenced to death for their crime they have done. This correlates to Wiesel speech which all “gave into indifferences” including his own “God”(The Perils of Indifference). With no form of guidance and hope driven from others to show human emotion, the teen’s came to the realization that the only way they may be able to stand a chance seeing freedom from the camp was herself. Thus, with the knowledge of the teens fate, we must come to a understandment that to see hope for a future world without indifferences.We must learn showing a helping hand in signs genocide such as the holocaust and not wait.
After nearly two years of misery, a young boy finally saw the first ray of hope on the horizon; the Americans had finally arrived, and the Nazis were gone. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel shares his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Wiesel was one of the minority of Jews to survive the Holocaust during World War II. His family did not make it through with him, and this had lasting effects. Wiesel’s identity changed completely during his experiences in Auschwitz; he lost his faith in God and he became indifferent to his survival and the survival of his family members. Despite these hardships, however, he ultimately became a stronger person than he was before.
During times of war, people's humanity is negatively affected without them even knowing. People cause suffering by doing nothing - by not interfering with bad things that happen, self-proclaimed ‘good people’ allow others to undergo misery. Elie Wiesel speaks about the world’s lack of intervention during the Holocaust in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, angry, “that the world did know and remained silent” (Document B), and goes on to explain how, “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (Document B). Wiesel is anguished that so many people stood by and watched as others were systematically murdered by their own government. Regular citizens were so stricken with horror
“Had he been able to speak to us that night, we might still have been able to flee” (Wiesel 14). During the time of the Holocaust in 1941, a friend is coming to warn a young boy by the name of Elie Wiesel that human rights violations are occurring all over Europe lead by a man named Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler's goal was to keep the Aryan race alive and kill all others deemed not fit. There were many warning signs to the Jewish population that trouble was near. Many chose not to listen, or to ignore help from others, but in the end, this choice leads to the loss of things tangible and intangible.
Elie Wiesel’s speech “The Perils of Indifference” is a mind opening and emotional speech that prompts the audience to change the indifference that plagues America and many people in this time and age. He expresses to the audience that indifference is the reason appalling and horrifying events, such as the Holocaust, occur and why no one takes immediate actions to help the victims. To get his point across, Wiesel uses his own history and experiences so that the audience can visualize the Holocaust through the eyes of a survivor and to project the feelings of hopelessness and defeat that the victims felt when no one came to end the injustice. In this critique, Elie Wiesel’s rhetorical speech of indifference will show its effectiveness through testimony, emotion, and rhetorical questions; this speech accomplished its goal and without a doubt persuaded most of the audience to call out for change in indifference.
day before, one of which was merely a child so light in weight that he