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The Perils Of Indifference By Elie Wiesel

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In “The Perils of Indifference” a speech given from a holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel discussed the issues society had during World War 2 associated with insouciance. The speech revolved around the world coming to a new millennium, and he asked “what will the legacy of this vanishing century be?” This allows him to directly bring the topic of indifference into the equation quite brilliantly. He begins with his stories of prisoners sitting in Auschwitz that felt nothing, “They were dead and did not know it.” He states that indifference is the friend of the enemy. This allows the audience to feel the pain when he talks about his time as a Jewish prisoner, and how it reflected back to indifference. When his people needed help so many turned their heads so they wouldn’t have to acknowledge the problem because it didn’t affect their personal daily living. This became a serious problem during the war, indifference. …show more content…

He quotes pieces throughout his speech that gives the reader a chance to think a little deeper about what is being said. He states, “They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.” This quotation succeeds in a way that allows the audience to realize that the death he is talking about isn’t quick and easy, but lingering and devastating. Furthermore, by saying this, Wiesel constructs a pathway to his argument that this is what indifference brings to the world. That indifference is what put the Jews in harm’s way with no one willing to take them into safety, because it wasn’t their problem to handle. On a larger scale, he is simply saying that Hitler wasn’t the only one wrong in the equation, it was anyone with

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