The Perils of Indifference

President Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001). Wiesel addresses President Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, directly with gratitude, referring to President Clinton as both a representation of the American military that freed the concentration camps and as a guiding light amid the wars of the 1990s. President Clinton gives a face to Wiesel’s gratitude for the American effort during World War II. Nonetheless, in this gratitude is also a plea not to forget the human suffering that occurred in the concentration camps and that is occurring in the world of the 1990s. Wiesel’s gratitude toward President Clinton is ultimately hopeful in nature. President Clinton stands in contrast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American president during World War II, whom Wiesel saddles with a complicated legacy. The Allies were aware of the concentration camps but did not act quickly enough in Wiesel’s judgment to liberate them. Wiesel also cites the events of the St. Louis, a ship carrying nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees, that Roosevelt did not allow to disembark on US soil. Rather, the ship had to turn around for Nazi Germany, where the systematic oppression of Jews had already begun. In short, Roosevelt’s “image in Jewish history is flawed” (Paragraph 15). President Clinton had to deal directly with some of the 20th-century conflicts that Wiesel mentions. In fact, once out of office, Clinton admitted that the US military should have intervened earlier in the Rwandan conflict, suggesting that the United States could have saved as many as 100,000 lives. As the last US president in the millennium, Clinton seems to be for Wiesel a kind of transitional figure whose actions will help dictate the kind of future that the United States chooses—one based either on indifference or on remembrance.

As chancellor of Germany and leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler implemented what he called the Final Solution—the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. Hitler was democratically elected to power in 1933, a fact that echoes Wiesel’s warnings against indifference. Shortly after coming to power, Hitler proposed the Enabling Law to the Reichstag (Germany’s parliamentary building). When the law passed with an overwhelming majority, it gave Hitler the power to rule by decree. During Hitler’s reign, the Nazis carried out systematic campaigns of terror against Jews, confiscating their property, killing them, and forcing them to live in confined, Jewish-only ghettos. Jews were then rounded up and shipped via train to concentration camps, where they were forced into hard labor under inhumane conditions. The Nazis stripped Jewish prisoners of identifying markings, taking their clothing, shaving their heads, and tattooing serial numbers on their arms. Jewish prisoners had little to eat and were forced to live in cold, cramped conditions. Nazis harnessed industrial efficiency to kill Jews en masse in gas chambers, a fact that stands in sharp contrast with the technological promise of an advanced society. Indeed, World War II, both in the camps and in battle, saw the advancement of technology used to radicalize and anonymize death, offering stark examples of The Inhumanity of Indifference. That the Nazis purposely stripped Jewish prisoners of their identifying markers speaks to Wiesel’s mandate to remember. Because of the camps’ radical horrors and the anonymous nature of Jewish prisoners’ deaths, Wiesel feels compelled to speak out against the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. The Nazi campaign of death and destruction against the Jews relied heavily on erasure.