Elie Wiesel spoke to us at John Denver's Choices for the Future Symposium
one very still high mountain afternoon, over a decade ago.
From his remarks at the dedication ceremonies for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
April 22, 1993:
...
Fifty years ago, somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, a young Jewish woman
read in a Hungarian newspaper a brief account about the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Astonished, dismayed, she wondered aloud,
'Why,' she said, 'are our Jewish brothers doing that? Why are they fighting? Couldn't they wait quietly'--the
word was quietly--until the end of the war?' Treblinka, Ponar, Belzec, Chelmno, Birkenau. She had never heard of these places.
One year later, together with her entire family, she was already in a cattle car traveling to the black hole in time, the
black hole in history, named Auschwitz. ...
...
And in closing, Mr. President and distinguished guests, just one more remark. The woman
in the Carpathian Mountains of whom I spoke to you, that woman disappeared. She was my mother.
