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 20th
century .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,,
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