Elie Wiesel

It can be sometimes hard to face what happened during the Holocaust. Just hearing about it can bring up so many emotions and fears in all of us. These emotions are especially surfaced when you listen to someone like Elie Wiesel talk because there is such wisdom in his words. While listening to his speech on the Universal Lessons of the Holocaust, I was completely still, throwing myself in the middle of what was being said. You can read all of the history books that you want, but when a Holocaust survivor talks to you themselves, it is a whole different ball game. While reading Night, also by Eli Wiesel, it is very hard to not at least try to dismiss the story as fiction. It is continuously difficult to believe what people went through during World War II. It is even harder to go a little deeper and think about what children younger than I am had to endure. In this primary source of what it meant to "belong" to a concentration camp, I tried my hardest to put myself in this fifteen year old's shoes....I couldn't do it. The interesting thing is that the world still seems that it has not learned any lessons from the legacy of the Holocaust. We still have countless numbers of murders, genocides, terrorist attacks, etc. If we can not learn from something as horrible as a genocide, what will it take for our world to change? Let's just hope we don't have to find out.