Facebook is a great platform that has brought millions together .Its a great platform to express oneself .It is heavily populated – probably the most populated space in the world today .However – at some levels , it smacks of artificiality .A lot of people log onto facebook to see the amount of “likes” , a particular photograph, dress or achievement evokes .At many levels it is place to show off – your foreign travels ,your kids achievements ,your celebrity friends, your writng skills , and so on .Its like a Page 3 of a newspaper –interesting but in most cases not too serious .Majority of its members wouldn’t care less whats on the editorial page !! That’s why – Facebook does not seem to have noticed the demise of one of the greatest voices of the 20thcentury .And even if they have heard his name –they know very little about this remarkable human being
He was Ellie Wiesel , a Professor of Humanities at the Boston University and a Nobel Prize winning human being .But that is not what he is famous for ( he was called a “ Living Memorial’’ ).He was among the few who survived a Nazi concentration camp and lived to tell its tale with a moral fibre that made everyone believe what he said and wrote .
Wiesel was born in Romania, and was 15 when he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland with his family in 1944.
The future writer was later moved and ultimately freed from the Buchenwald camp in 1945. Of his relatives, only two of his sisters survived.
Wiesel said that Auschwitz was “to this day, a source of shock and astonishment.”
Wiesel survived the concentration camp ,and wrote a book which everyone should read .Its called “Night” , and is barely 115 pages or so .In the book Wiesel describes how the Nazis picked him and his family ,along with all the Jews from his home in Sighet. In his own words
“One by one, they passed in front of me,-teachers, friends, others, all those I had been afraid of, all those I could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs.”
“Night” recounted a journey of several days spent in an airless cattle car before the narrator and his family arrived in a place they had never heard of: Auschwitz. Mr. Wiesel recalled how the smokestacks filled the air with the stench of burning flesh, how babies were burned in a pit, and how a monocled Dr. Josef Mengele decided, with a wave of a bandleader’s baton, who would live and who would die. “ Women, and children below the age of 15 to the right , others to the left” Mengele barked . Mr. Wiesel watched his mother and his sister Tzipora walk off to the right, his mother protectively stroking Tzipora’s hair.To the right –meant the gas chambers ,to the left meant that men would be made to do labour and finally shot or gassed .
“I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever,” he wrote.
In Auschwitz and in a nearby labor camp called Buna, where he worked loading stones onto railway cars, Wiesel turned feral under the pressures of starvation, cold and daily atrocities. “Night” recounts how he became so obsessed with getting his plate of soup and crust of bread that he watched guards beat his father with an iron bar while he had “not flickered an eyelid” to help.In silence .
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed,” Mr. Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.”
Ellie Wiesel long grappled with what he called his “dialectical conflict”: the need to recount what he had seen and the futility of explaining an event that defied reason and imagination. In his Nobel speech, he said that what he had done with his life was to try “to keep memory alive” and “to fight those who would forget.”
“Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. You kill a person again by forgetting how he died him” he said forcefully .
“If I survived, it must be for some reason,” said Wiesel. “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with it anymore, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”.
Death snuffed out that remarkable voice. In an interview to Oprah Winfrey he had said “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.” .
Ellie Wiesel died yesterday .
But his voice will continue to reverberate. And all you kids who go on the much touted NASA trips which schools organize – please do visit the Holocaust Memorial in Washington .Ellie Wiesel has contributed hugely to its set up. There is so much to learn from America apart from eating burgers ,drinking Coke ,Bloomingdales, Macys, Times Square .!! I would like to end with my favourite quote of his
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.”
articelnya menarik gan,,