Elie Wiesel Quotes
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'Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!' the Hungarian police were screaming.That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.
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An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded:'Men to the left! Women to the right!'Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father's hand press against mine: we were alone.
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People thought this was a good thing. We would no longer have to look at all those hostile faces, endure those hate-filled stares. No more fear. No more anguish. We would live entirely among Jews, among brothers...
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There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
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I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it. One doesn't study calculus before studying arithmetic. In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.
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In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
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Whenever an angel says 'Be not afraid!' you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.
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The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions.
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If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity.
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What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.
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The most important question a human being has to face... What is it? The question, Why are we here?
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None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.
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I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.
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Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
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Of course some wars may have been necessary or inevitable, but none was ever regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it. The Talmud says, 'Talmidei hukhamim marbin shalom baolam' (It is the wise men who will bring about peace). Perhaps, because wise men remember best.
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What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.
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If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.
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I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
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From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated-ever.
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That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.
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No human being is illegal.
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'The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal...'(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)
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After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again.
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Most people thought we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.