Wiesel's Message of Justice Highlights Worldfest From: University Currents Date: May 10, 2000 Story by: Dawn Fuller Phone: (513) 556-1823 Photo by: Lisa Ventre Archive: General News, Campus News Nobel Peace Prize recipient and worldwide human rights advocate Elie Wiesel shared the horrors of his past and his hopes for the future as he addressed a crowd of 5,000 in Shoemaker Center on May 8. Wiesel's appearance, a Just Community event, was part of UC's weeklong Worldfest celebration. Wiesel's speech was attended by UC President Joseph A. Steger, Mitchel Livingston, UC vice president for student affairs and human resources, UC students and faculty, as well as children and members of Cincinnati's retirement community. Wiesel is the author of more than 40 books his most widely read work, "Night," describes how his family was destroyed by the Holocaust. The family lived in the village of Sighet, Transylvania, now a part of Romania. Wiesel was 15 when the Nazis rounded up the village Jews and sent them to concentration camps. He never saw his mother and little sister again. He was determined not to be separated from his father and they endured Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where his father, sick and broken by the barbaric treatment of the Nazis, died. When the concentration camps were freed, Wiesel, along with many Jewish orphans, was sent to France, where he eventually found two older sisters still alive. In observance of UC's Just Community initiative, Wiesel's speech was appropriately titled, "Against Indifference." "What is it about a society that makes it unjust," questioned Wiesel. "Our society is indifferent. We remain eating and drinking and playing basketball while a continent away, people die." Wiesel became an American citizen in 1963 and said his first impression of the United States was that the country was a just community because of its heroism in World War I and World War II. He recalled moving to America in the '50s, and touring the South to explore his new country. "I went to the South and saw inscriptions, 'for whites only,' 'for blacks only,' and I felt shame. I have never felt shame as a Jew, but I felt shame because I was white. What hurt me, what outraged me even more, it was the law -- the law to humiliate people." "What is a just community? We believe morally, ethically and philosophically that a human being is defined by his or her relationship toward the other. "Why did God create one man?" Wiesel continued. "So that in due time, no person would be able to say, 'I am superior to you.'" Wiesel described indifference toward the human slaughter in Kosovo, Rwanda and Sudan. He spoke of indifference toward the elderly. "If I were in a position of guiding and suggesting, I would arrange for children to spend time in an old age house once a month. I'd bring the young and old together -- the young being the innocent and the old being experienced -- the young being the future and the old being the past." "Nobody will explain to me that in the year 2000, we still have to find racism, we still have to find hunger, that every minute a child dies of disease or violence or malnutrition. What we throw out in our restaurants is enough to feed a continent." "If you don't feel others' pain, you won't feel your own either, and the moment you stop feeling pain, the humanity is gone. I used to say hate is the opposite of love, but it's indifference." Wiesel directed UC students to be sensitive not just to what hurts themselves, but also to what hurts others. Among the audience was barber George Newsom of Westwood, a World War II veteran who was the first American through the gate to free the concentration camp where Wiesel was held at Buchenwald. Newsom also attended an informal gathering at Hillel Student Jewish Center with Wiesel, Rabbi Abie Ingber and students of Hillel. Ingber seated Wiesel in a chair formerly used by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of reform Judaism in Cincinnati. "Isaac Mayer Wise would sit in this chair with students in the basement of Plum Street Temple, so this is appropriate for our teacher to come and sit with us," said Ingber. Students asked Wiesel for his thoughts on the death of John Cardinal O'Connor, the archbishop of New York who died May 4 at the age of 80. Wiesel hailed O'Connor as one of the key figures in building the bridge of respect and understanding between Christians and Jews, the strongest relations have ever been. Wiesel also praised the Pope for building that bridge of understanding. In his book, "Night," Wiesel looked back on his life before the Nazi invasion, when he was a boy who passionately studied the Talmud and desired to unfold the mysteries of the cabbala. After witnessing the execution of Jews, enduring hard labor, starvation and freezing temperatures and watching his father die, Wiesel's book described closing his heart to God. "I was together with my father and as long as he was alive, I was alive," Wiesel told the students at Hillel. "After he died, I stopped living." Wiesel told the students his writing helped him heal, but it was the birth of his son that changed his life. "I felt I had to build a world that was worthy of my son and of the children. Let it be a better world for the children of the world otherwise, why have them?" Wiesel's worldwide literary following includes young children who often write him letters after they have read "Night." Those letters from children are his priority. Wiesel's efforts to educate the world about the Holocaust and his passion for spreading his message of world peace have led to honors that include the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement. He holds more than 90 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning and is a professor for the humanities at Boston University. Find more worldfest information at www.soa.uc.edu/worldfest/