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Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

Elie Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 30
Died: 2016
Died: July 2
Autobiographer
Humanist
Journalist
Judaic Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Professor
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Sighetu Marmaţiei
Eliezer Wiesel
A-7713
Élie Wiesel
Holocaust
Tragedy
Response
Answer
Asked
Answers
Sometimes
Auschwitz
Even
Magnitude

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Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.
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If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.
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There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.
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I have a tremendous respect for Professor [Frank Moore] Cross.
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When I say it doesn't make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.
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I personally have no doubt that the Exodus occurred. How it occurred, I don't know.
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Whenever an angel says Be not afraid! you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.
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The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the ... most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD's and MD's. Couldn't believe it.
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When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.
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Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.
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Humanity would never tolerate it
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It's not only America. Terrorism now is a threat to the whole world.
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Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain
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But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I knew best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.
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I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the story of my death. So that you could prepare yourselves while there was still time. To live? I don't attach any importance to my life any more. I'm alone. No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me.
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In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, that person comes first. One's very suffering gives one priority. . . . To watch over one who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.
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If you read Exodus 15 carefully, it describes a storm at sea. This is the old Yahwistic source. In the retelling of the story in the later Priestly source, it is more miraculous: The water stands up on either side like a wall. There are walls of water standing up. As you move back in time, oddly enough, the story becomes more historical.
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None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.
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God made (human beings) because he loves stories.
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Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate - healthy virile hate - for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.
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