Elie Wiesel Speech Essay

In Elie Wiesel's speech he touches on the topics of the causes, effects, and lessons from the holocaust, our duties as a human being, and finally how we can achieve peace for ourselves and everyone around the globe. In paragraph eight he states that, “…the world did know and remain silent.” Wiesel is referring to the general public of Germany as a whole. Wiesel also says that, “And action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all.” Which simply says by not doing anything this was allowed to happen. You can link that to how German citizens not spreading the word or opposed Hitler. How was Hitler so effective in getting all the Jew and other “undesirables”? German citizens would point the authorities to the Jews, homosexuals,

Conflict: Many Jews died from the terrible tragedies of the Holocaust. They were sent to these concentration camps to wither be killed upon arrival, or work to death.

World War 2 was a tragedy for everyone and it will always be remembered. We all hope that this part of history never repeats itself. The summer of 1944 Elie Wiesel and his family was taken by Nazis. They all got transferred in a train car to Buchenwald where his family died on the the way there. Then in the year 1945, American soldiers saved his life. He was just a small boy who did not understand english but, was terrified of what might come next. He thought he was never gonna feel joy again but years later, when he was an old man, he would finally understand and was grateful for what they did.

On the 12th of April, in the year 1999, Elie Wiesel gave a speech at the White House. Several members of congress, President Clinton, and the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, were present to listen to him. His speech became a powerful testament to the pitfalls and dangers of being indifferent to the sufferings of others. However, Wiesel’s speech was also a very skillful exercise in using rhetoric for persuasion. By using certain wording and striking the right balance of facts and emotions, he was moving the audience in the direction of understanding his point of view. He was moving the audience to not feel sympathy, but actual empathy to the events he was speaking about. To feel the as closely as he felt for these events in history. He acted as judge, jury, disappointed parent and as vengeful deity. In this paper, I will examine key elements of his speech to show that by instilling deep feelings of shame, fear, and even pride at the right moments can inspire people to open their minds to the dangers of ignoring the pleads of help from their fellow man.

On April 12, 1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel delivered a speech in order to inspire the American people to take action in times of human suffering, so that events like the holocaust will never again take place. Through the use of persuasion, word choice, and rhetorical techniques, Wiesel successfully appeals to his audience of President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, and the rest of the American public. The main point in his speech is that of indifference and what can come about because of it. In order to define indifference to the audience and persuade them to never be indifferent in the future, Wiesel exclaims it as having no difference. Wiesel also uses descriptions about what may cause indifference; as “a strange and unnatural state in

“If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one.” Said Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, who uses his book Night to highlight the true terrors of what happened during his life in the concentration camps during World War II. As the author and main character in Night, Elie describes his personal experiences that drastically changed his life forever. As a result, we can tell Elie is a dynamic character because he begins to question his faith in God and in his religion, his attitude towards his father and his father’s survival changes, and his childhood and innocence are lost. First and foremost, Elie begins to question his faith in God and in his religion.

“If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one.” These words were stated by Elie Wiesel, main character and author of the book Night. He uses these words to describe the horrifying and traumatic experiences he survived during the Holocaust. Through the book, Elie’s innocence is taken from him and he is a completely different person by the end of the book. As a result, Elie is a dynamic character because he questions his faith in God, changes his attitude towards his father, and loses his will to live after his father’s death.

It illustrates how the traumatic conditions and oppression in the camps have conditioned Elie to think and behave differently, even towards someone so close to him. The anger that he carries wears away at his motivation and will to survive, and his drive

Elizer Wiesel, Elie for short, was born in Sighet, Romania on September 30th in 1928 to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. He had two older sisters and one younger sister. He was born into a very religious family, starting his religious schooling at the very young age of 3. Though this widely recognized author, journalist, and social activist is mostly known for his memoir telling of the horrors of the Holocaust it was even during his childhood he, his family, and his fellow Jewish community faced discrimination and injustices for their religious beliefs. In an interview for achievement.org he told of how twice a year on holidays such as Christmas and Easter he recalls the “anti-Semitic outbursts” and how he and the other Jewish people were afraid to go outside of fear of being beaten

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.

In Night, Elie Wiesel had a terrible experience living as Jew as most Jews did, but by the end, it was unclear if he was or was not still Jewish he claimed over and over, not understanding why this was happening to him and his family. When World War II was over, was Elie still Jewish? There were millions of Jewish people killed in the holocaust, but, why was Elie any different from anyone else why did he deserve to live and not someone else? Terrible thing were happening to him and his community and some of them have believed that, they have done all that they could, they believed in their God, and worshipped him but, some of them thought God did not care for them anymore. A group of Jews had started questioning God asking him why was this happening to them? Why did the Nazis have so much hatred towards the Jews? Should the people care

Elie Wiesel was a memorable survivor of the unforgettable survivor of the unforgettable Holocaust. His accomplishments and his wise words were inspiring. He went through so much and he moves on from it and worries about us first.

In this speech, he develops compassion and compels readers to act to promote social justice. He does this by describing his feelings and how he was treated during the Holocaust. Wiesel also emphasizes his feelings when the USA helped out other countries that had refugees, which suggests that they had learned from their mistakes and will intervene when injustice occurs. In his speech, Elie Wiesel develops compassion while explaining the effects the Holocaust had on him and other Jewish people. In paragraph 13 he says, “In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders.

From what the author describes, life at the concentration camp strips the humanity from a person. The upbringing at the camp turns Elie into a different person than the simple Jewish boy. He no longer cares about saving his father he just wants to relieve the responsibility of taking care of him. This makes Elie disregard his father when he needed his help the most because he could only take care of himself. In the short story “I kept saying ‘Help me, help me.’

The Holocaust is widely known as one of the most horrendous and disturbing events in history that the world has seen; over six million lives were lost, in fact the total number of deceased during the Holocaust has never been determined. The footage of concentration camps and gas chambers left the world in utter shock, but photos and retellings of the events cannot compare to being a victim of the Holocaust and living through the horror that the rest of the world regarded in the safety of their homes. Elie Wiesel recognized the indifference that the