Empathy In Elie Wiesel's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

“ … The world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured, remained silent in the face of genocide.” - Elie Wiesel. The man behind that quote is one of the few people in the world to survive one of the worst tragedies in human history, The Holocaust. An event in which millions of people perished, all because of a crazed dictator’s dream. Elie Wiesel who amazingly survived the horrors, documented his experience in his book, Night. He has a very specific message in his book that many of us can learn from. Elie Wiesel wrote Night to show that the silence and hesitation surrounding the Holocaust is was what allowed it to occur and continue for as long as it did,

Empathy; the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. An admirable trait, it often coincides with one's resilience. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his experiences as a young man during the Holocaust. It is a journey of suffering and survival, where the true devastation of the Holocaust is brought to light. Elies great empathy for his father shaped his resilience which allowed him to survive.

My thought of Elie Wiesel talking about compassion is, since he was in the Holocaust some like Miep and Mr. Kraler showed compassion to the Franks and Van Daans by giving them a place to to hide and food to eat so they can survive. Elie Wiesel must of shown a lot of compassion to people and that might be one of the reasons why he survived Auschwitz he must have shown compassion to some or most and he might have been shown compassion by those people. When I first saw Elie Wiesel I saw that he had a good soul. He didn’t look like he would do anything bad to anyone. I could image him as that person who’s always there for you, he shows compassion.

In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.

It is a common assumption among numerous people in the world that the Holocaust never existed. In fact, almost fifty percent of the world population never even heard of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel helped people around the world learn about the Holocaust through his book “Night.” He wanted people to see the bravery, courage, and guilt of the Jews through his book. “Night” shows the horrific and malicious acts in the German concentration camps during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel successfully created a clever plot consisting of dialogue, introspection and dynamic characters to make his story realistic and compelling. Elie WIesel changed the protagonist Eliezer, an observant Jewish youngster, that strived to delve deeper into the mythical traditions of his religion, changed to a person that questions God’s greatness, a disloyal son and a person that only seeks personal gain.

Elie Wiesel’s somber speech, “The Perils of Indifference”, demonstrated the harsh reality of the numerous evils harvesting in the world. The main evil though was simply indifference, or a lack of concern. As a young Jewish boy, he faced the wickedness of the Holocaust, imprisoned at Buchenwald and Auschwitz and also losing both his parents and younger sister. The speaker saw atrocious horrors and suffered for a prolonged amount of time. Why was this permitted? Wiesel pinpoints the indifference of humans as the real enemy, causing further suffering and lost to those already in peril.

Elie Wiesel voiced his emotions and thoughts of the horrors done to Jewish people during World War II whilst developing his claim. Wiesel “remember[s] his bewilderment,” “his astonishment,” and “his anguish” when he saw they were dropped into the ghetto to become slaves and to be slaughtered. He repeats the words “I remember” because he and the world, especially those who suffered in the ghettos and camps, would never be able to forget how innocent suffered. Consequently, he emphasized that “no one” has the right to advocate for the dead. Like many other people in the world, he lost his family during the war. He lost people

In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel strives to inform his audience of the unbelievable atrocities of the Holocaust in order to prevent them from ever again responding to inhumanity and injustice with silence and neutrality. The structure or organization of Wiesel’s speech, his skillful use of the rhetorical appeals of pathos and ethos, combined with powerful rhetorical devices leads his audience to understand that they must never choose silence when they witness injustice. To do so supports the oppressors.

Wiesel subtly influences his audience to feel the agony that he felt during the events of the Holocaust, and the pain that he still feels today over losing so many important people in his life. This is due to his use of pathos throughout the speech, and he addresses that, “No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.” Wiesel understands that his speech can only honor the individuals who lost their lives in the torturous concentration camps, but he can’t speak on their behalf. He goes on to say that he still feels the presence of the people he lost, “The presence of my parents, that of my little sister. The presence of my teachers, my friends, my companions.” Wiesel wanted the

Frederick Buechner once said, “Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin.” Similarly, an author by the name of Barbara Lazear Ascher wrote an essay called “On Compassion,” in which she states that people learn about compassion when they experience hardships and begin to put oneself in another’s place. Along with the idea of compassion being learned, Ascher also tries to make us wonder what our motive is that leads us to being compassionate.

In Barbara Lazear Ascher’s essay titled “On Compassion” Ascher considers the concept of compassion by utilizing her own encounters with the homeless as a vehicle to make her argument. In her argument, she interprets compassion as an abstract concept, and portrays empathy as a building block to compassion; making the argument that to be a more tolerant society one must first learn empathy in order to demonstrate true compassion. When analyzing Ascher’s rhetoric, her style, diction and rhetorical devices reveal a skeptical tone and serve a greater purpose in appealing to the reader’s sense of ethos and pathos. Namely, Ascher’s use of first-person narrative and word choice like “we” appeals to the reader’s sense of ethos, which eventually builds

Imagine you yourself just enjoying life with your friends, family, and neighbors. Then all of a sudden you see guards screaming and yelling at you to leave all your things go pack a small bag and leave everything else behind and get on a bus with a whole bunch of people crammed on their. You may even get separated from your family and not see them ever again. Then you keep thinking where are we going and what's gonna happen to us and your family. Well this happened to Elie Wiesel and his family they were enjoying life and all of a sudden they see guards and then getting on a bunch of busses and getting separated from their family. They had no idea that all of this was going to happen, because life was good and they were living it.Wiesel’s personality, faith with God, and relationships changed as a result of the Holocaust.

In the past, indifference has led to the murder of millions of people. Indifference is when we, the humans race, do not care about those who suffer from the injustice, violence, or oppression on behalf of others (Clare). On 12 April 1992, Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor gave a speech regarding human indifference in front of President William J. Clinton and the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, at the White House. What was he trying to accomplish during his speech? In the speech, titled “The Perils of Indifference,” Elie Wiesel showed gratitude to the American people, President Clinton, and Mrs. Hillary Clinton for the help they brought and apprised the audience about the violent consequences and human suffering due to indifference against humanity (Wiesel). This speech was persuasive. It was also effective because it conveyed to the audience the understanding of

During the unjust times of the holocaust, thousands of Jews were being tortured and killed as the world stayed silent. In Elie Wiesel’s “Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance” speech, Wiesel shares the horrendous and unjust times of the holocaust and the impact on how nobody decided to speak up. As a quiet survivor of the labor camps Wiesel had first hand experience on the silence all the Jews encountered during the unjust times of the holocaust. Through the use of the rhetorical appeals ethos and pathos, supported by the figurative techniques of anaphora and motif, Wiesel persuades the audience to use their voices against any form of injustice.

Wiesel starts out with an emotional message that also asserts his credibility on the subject of the speech. A stirring opening statement creates imagery that the audience cannot help but picture. By using the phrase “a young Jewish boy” to describe himself and describing his feelings towards liberation as having “no joy in [his] heart”, Wiesel appeals to the audience’s emotions and sensitivities towards the tragedy of the Holocaust. (Wiesel 1) This allows the audience to visualize a young Wiesel being part of the dark story with suffering, pain, brutal punishment and starvation. Wiesel also shows that he has authority to speak on injustice in the world, as he experienced one of the worst injustices to date. His authority to speak makes his message even more powerful. Having personal experience with the Holocaust, Wiesel is able to effectively and efficiently describe the horrors and injustice that many people