Elie Wiesel Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

The Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech written by Elie Wiesel was delivered in 1986 at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Wiesel writes the speech using his experiences of the Holocaust and his personal thoughts mainly to persuade people to do the right thing. The speech was written to show the suffering that people went through during the Holocaust so that no event like the Holocaust would happen again in the future; that no person would ever have to go through the suffering and torture the Jews went through. Wiesel develops the idea that when people face suffering or humiliation they should not remain silent through the use of pathos, allusion, and parallelism.

Wiesel appeals to the emotions of the audience throughout his speech in order to further persuade the audience. Wiesel asks if he has “the right to represent the multitudes who have perished” and the “right to accept the great honor on their behalf” (Wiesel 2). He says he did not and that “no one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions” (2). Wiesel engages in the emotions of his audience, trying to make them feel sorrow for the hundreds of thousands of Jews that died in the Holocaust. He also says that no one person could ever

Wiesel said, “I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night” (4). Elie Wiesel is alluding to his book, Night. His book is about his experience of the Holocaust. Wiesel also says, “It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed” (4). He is talking about how the Jews were forced out of their homes and into ghettos. After a few weeks, they were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to concentration camps, where they were worked to death. Wiesel’s use of allusions help demonstrate why we should never remain