Word: wiesel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those children, Elie Wiesel, led the commission on to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, where crematories once burned night and day. Linking arms with four other survivors, Wiesel marched over the tracks that had brought him here a world ago and laid a wreath on a monument to the fallen. "Do not let your eyes deceive you," he said quietly...
...Poland, Wiesel met again and again with government officials to try to persuade them to share materials and records of Polish Jewry that they had withheld for almost 40 years. Repeatedly he managed to gain concessions. Exhausted, as lean as a Giacometti sculpture, Wiesel walked through the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, past the forest of neglected tombstones, until he found one that seemed to summarize his mission: the carved figure of a man who died in 1943, holding in his hand the final symbol of the ghetto struggle, a grenade...
Again in Moscow, Wiesel pressed for records withheld since...
...again he succeeded. Roman Rodenko, the Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, praised Wiesel's mission as "noble"; Soviet historians and writers first insisted that only Soviet citizens died in the war, not Jews as such. But they ended by promising copies of documents and inviting an exchange of scholars...
Then why try? Why not let the unbearable past recede into the anaesthesia of history books? "Simply because we can't and still call ourselves human beings," said Wiesel at journey's end. "We do not have this commission simply to remember, but to warn. Last time it was the killing of the Jews, then the attempt to annihilate humanity itself. Between the two came the sin of indifference. Today when we hear the word holocaust it is preceded by the word nuclear. If there is to be no new holocaust, first we have to look backward...