The Perils Of Difference By Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel is a survivor. He is a survivor because of how he was able to go through all that he did including, making it through the selection that his mom and baby sister sadly didn’t make it past. Elie Wiesel grew up in that prison as he says. He would see all the bodies, all the faces of little children that it affected. He and his father were chosen to work for the Nazis. They were put into stuffed areas where you would have bunks of up to 3 people per bunk all the way down the place they were assigned. This made most of the people inside these areas die faster due to diseases as it spread from person to person and assigned area to assigned area. He and his father had to work in these harsh conditions as people were underfed and starving

In his speech “The Perils of Indifference” his purpose of this speech was to show the president that all he went through, and the president acknowledge everything and make an award for him. Elie Wiesel also talks about how all the children, and everyone is affected by this because there were children like himself that survived and lived on with the trauma of everything that happened. He shows this in the quote “What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.” He says this because of how adults are meant for war if need be, and the children have to watch and can’t help so if something bad happens during their time of a war the children get stuck with those thoughts or

He goes on to say throughout the speech “And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.” This means that the things that he went through if he were to forget those things then he wouldn’t be helping not forget the horrible things that he and other people were put through. He never forgets those that died during those days. All the things that happened that changed people’s lives and usually that their lives that got taken away from them. He also says “As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled, we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs. This is showing how much he cares for all the people that support him and all the things they have done for