Community Book Event

Students in Facing History and Ourselves classes will host an event for the community to discuss the book Night, a Holocaust survivor memoir by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel. For details about the event, contact the class instructor, David Cohen.

Monday, March 4, 2013

"Never Again"


One of the worst things about the Holocaust is that we allowed it to happen again. In Rwanda and eastern Europe, genocide continued to happen while the rest of the world stood by. Elie Wiesel said in an interview “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Elie Wiesel says this both reflectively, and about the genocide in Rwanda. He believed that the US should have sent out a radio broadcast to warn the Jews about the trains and where they were headed, so they could have avoided getting on them at all costs. Although, some experts believe that this could have encouraged the Nazis to speed up the process and openly killing more Jews and other groups. Many people in the US also did not know to what extent the Holocaust was happening. The Rwandan genocide, on the other hand, was much more open, which is one of the reasons it was controversial that we did not get involved. The world thought the holocaust was the end of all genocide, but superpowers need to be less tentative to intervene when it comes to innocent civilians being killed.

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