Word: holocaust
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...Left, to have simple answers. Did the people of South Viet Nam really want Communism? The 1 million people who have risked their lives to escape the regime have stated their opinion. Did the American bombing of Cambodia, as some contend, really cause Pol Pot's unthinkable holocaust? A Khmer Rouge leader and theoretician named Khieu Samphan actually formulated the ideological foundation for the genocide long before the Americans started bombing. Pol Pot, once in power, set in motion the "Year Zero" program that led to the extermination of one-fourth of the population, some 2 million people...
Some 20 American publishers rejected Night. "The Holocaust was not something people wanted to know about in those days," the author remembers. "The diary of Anne Frank was about as far as anyone wanted to venture into the dark." Night, finally published in the U.S. in 1960, drew them far deeper, into an abyss that was appalling to contemplate and impossible to ignore. It was as if a thousand tongues had suddenly become unstuck...
...witness was born in the charred world of the Holocaust. "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night," he recalls in his first book. "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...
Volumes by other writers, films, television programs followed Night, tracing the origins and consequences of genocide. Some of them were legitimate, but many were full of the now familiar Holocaust cant about survivor guilt or the complicity of the victims. Ironically, it was Wiesel who brought the term Holocaust out of scholarly usage into common parlance in a New York Times book review some 25 years ago: "I used it because I had no other word. Now I'm sorry. It's been so trivialized and vulgarized. Today one must ask, 'Do you mean the show or the event...
...lives with his wife Marion, who translates his work from French into English, and their 12- year-old son Shlomo Elisha, Wiesel gazes down at the bare trees in Central Park and ponders. "Frequently I ask myself, how can one bring a child into this dreadful world, where Holocaust is now preceded by the word nuclear? And then I answer: In a faithless time, what greater act of belief is there than the one of birth? And what better thing to do than prevent the greatest murder of all: the killing of time...