It Is Impossible to Remain Silent

Ultimately they led me to believe that the debate about distances is ungrounded, because as long as there are men there will be God.

Evil survived Auschwitz. The victory of the Allies did not stop the existence of Evil.

It all comes down to this for me: We discovered absolute Evil. And not absolute Good. So what can we do for the young people who are kind enough to read what we have written or to listen to us, so that they won’t fall into despair? How can we go about telling them that it is nonetheless given to man to thirst for the absolute in Good and not only in Evil?

About Elie Wiesel
ELIE WIESEL AND JORGE SEMPRÚN INITIALLY HAD nothing in common. But destiny brought them together.
Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania, to a middle-class Jewish family. He spoke Yiddish, Hungarian, and Romanian. He studied the Talmud and dreamed of becoming a learned teacher of Kabbalah. Sensitive, with an inclination to ponder existential questions, Wiesel was a delicate human being from an early age. As a child and as a teenager, he suffered the consequences of Romanian and, later, Hungarian antisemitism.
On May 16, 1944, after being marked with the yellow star and interned for twenty-six days in the local ghetto, Wiesel was deported by the Hungarian gendarmerie. Together with his family, he was included in the first transport of the Jews of Sighet sent to Auschwitz. His mother, Sarah, and younger sister, Tzipora, were gassed upon arrival in the camp. “Never shall I forget that smoke…. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever…. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes,”