Elie Wiesel: Use

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world.”

“For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act.”

“The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.”

“Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.”

“The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria…”

“Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.”

“Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.”

“The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life… He played that which he would never play again.”

“Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible.”

“If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be dying of starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism and fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not have believed it.”

“When I woke up, it was daylight. That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet had abandoned him.
I went to look for him.
Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn't find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival, to take care of myself…Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever.”

“The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.”

“The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing: we were entirely among ourselves. A small Jewish republic…”

“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.”

“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.”

“We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic. And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension.”

“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.”

“Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm.
Blessed be God's name?
Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?”

“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.”