Hope, Despair and Memory

In this Nobel Lecture, Wiesel connects his experience as a Holocaust survivor with his belief in universal human rights. He does this first by depicting the horrors of the Holocaust, then by explaining the difficulties the survivors faced in communicating what they had experienced, and finally by observing that many other groups continue to be oppressed, facing their own horrors. Beyond any particular case, Wiesel also links the experience of the Holocaust to human rights in the abstract, including the importance of pacifism, which Wiesel sees as part of the Jewish tradition.

Wiesel asks his fellow Jewish people to remember their plight in order to understand the plight of others. The atrocities they have lived through should serve, Wiesel argues, as a vehicle for their defense of other groups in similar situations. As a Holocaust survivor, he calls it his “supreme duty” to remember his suffering in the hope of preventing future atrocities. Having lived through the terrors of racist, cultural, and religious oppression, Wiesel especially focuses on ethnic and wartime conflicts—apartheid, the continued persecution of Jewish people in the Soviet Union and Ethiopia, and various groups of refugees. However, he also exhorts his

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