Quotes from Elie Wiesel

Its genesis: inside the kingdom of night, I witnessed a strange trial. Three rabbis-all erudite and pious men-decided one winter evening to indict God for allowing his children to be massacred, I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.

He brought it about that a people should attain happiness through tears, that the freedom of a nation, like that of a man, should be a monument built upon a pile, a foundation of dead bodies…

At the gate, the sign proclaimed that work meant freedom.

I thought he was talking about my grandmother. I didn't want to see her. I knew she had died - of thirst, maybe - and I was afraid she wouldn't be as I remembered her. I was afraid she wouldn't have the black shawl on her head, nor those burning tears in her eyes, nor that clear, calm expression that could make you forget you were cold.

Auschwitz." Nobody had ever heard that name.

Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?" And

Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And

He was silent. "Let's be evacuated with the others," I said. He didn't answer. He was looking at my foot. "You think you'll be able to walk?" "Yes, I think so." "Let's hope we won't regret it, Eliezer."     AFTER THE WAR, I learned the fate of those who had remained at the infirmary. They were, quite simply, liberated by the Russians, two days after the evacuation.     I

Do not make fun of God, even if He is making fun of you.

But the human soul isn't like the earth, the soul needs storm, and fire and dizziness. The body has time it moves slowly and prudently, step by step, in obedience to laws of gravity, but the soul brushes time and laws aside. It wants to push forward, regardless of the cost in pain, or intoxication, or even madness. That is the only way it has of raising itself to God.

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.

If I were to refuse to obey orders I should betray my living friends. And the living have more rights over us than the dead. You told me that yourself. Therefore choose life, it is written in the Scriptures. I have espoused the cause of the living, and that is no betrayal.

His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I

Don't you know them? They don't need Jews to unleash a pogrom against Jews.

And throughout those evenings a conviction grew in me that [he] would draw me with him into eternity, into that time where question and answer would become one.

shot … Death enveloped me, it suffocated me. It stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot. To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing. To break rank, to let myself slide to the side of the road … My

Every tragedy is unique, just as every human is unique. When a person loses someone dear to her, who am I to say that my tragedy was greater? I have no right. For that person, her tragedy is the greatest in the world—and she is right in thinking so.

Ormai non mi interessavo ad altro che alla mia scodella quotidiana di zuppa, al mio pezzo di pane raffermo. Il pane, la zuppa: tutta la mia vita. Ero un corpo. Forse ancora meno: uno stomaco affamato. Soltanto lo stomaco sentiva il tempo passare.

When you die and go to heaven our maker is not going to ask, 'why didn't you discover the cure for such and such? why didn't you become the Messiah?' The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is 'why didn't you become you?

Dietro di me udii il solito uomo domandare: - Dov'è dunque Dio? E io sentivo in me una voce che gli rispondeva: - Dov'è? Eccolo: è appeso lì, a quella forca…

Io mettevo macchinalmente un piede dietro l'altro, trascinavo il mio corpo scheletrico ancora tanto pesante. Se avessi potuto sbarazzarmene! Malgrado i miei sforzi per non pensare sentivo che ero diviso in due: io e il mio corpo; e l'odiavo.

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere. To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

the rabbi comes in to read the Psalms with you and hear you say the Vidui, that terrible confession in which you admit your responsibility not only for the sins you have committed, whether by word, deed, or thought, but also for those you may have caused others to commit.

Only memory matters. Mine sometimes overflows. Because it harbours my father's memories, too, since his mind has become a sieve. No, not a sieve: an autumn leaf, dried, torn. No, a phantom which I see only at midnight. I know: one cannot see a memory. But I can. I see it as the shadow of a shadow which constantly withdraws and turns inward. I hardly glimpse it, and it vanishes in the abyss.