You probably saw this one coming from a mile away.
After all, what's being either remembered or forgotten in "Hope, Despair and Memory" is 100% grief and suffering. While the kind of suffering caused by the Holocaust is unfathomable, and the forty years between then and this speech have brought all kinds of new suffering, that's all the more reason to keep the memory of those who have suffered—and all their suffering—alive.
Questions About Suffering
- Why did Wiesel struggle to convey the suffering they endured during the Holocaust?
- Why should the remembrance of suffering protect against future suffering?
- Does Wiesel think one people's suffering should be remembered over another's?
- Why did the survivors of the Holocaust truly despair only after they left the concentration camps?
Chew on This
Elie Wiesel's theory about memory being able to stop future tragedy is really banking on empathy in order to work. Simply knowing about injustice in the world isn't going to cut it—people have to actually care about other people's suffering to do something about it.
One of the problems Elie Wiesel ran into while speaking up about his experiences during the Holocaust was other people simply not being able to comprehend the scale of suffering that he went through. If you haven't been through something of that scale (and indeed, few people have, fortunately enough), it can be hard to really feel the weight of it.