Hope Despair And Memory Pdf
In Memoriam
Grade 9: Hope, Despair, and Memory intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be. To read Wiesel’s “Hope, Despair, and Memory.” Be sure to mark the text for evidence of his argument, counterarguments, evidence, and reasoning. About the Author Elie Wiesel (1928–) was born in the town of Sighet, now part of Romania. During World War II, he and his family were deported to the German concen-tration and extermination camps. What's the main idea of Hope, Despair and Memory? Get a synopsis of Hope, Despair and Memory with questions to ponder and quotes to back it up. Hope, Despair and Memory -Elie Wiesel Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986 A Hasidic legend tells us that the great Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov, Master of the Good Name, also known as the Besht, undertook an urgent and perilous mission: to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people, all humanity were suffering too much, beset by too many evils.
Lesson 2: “Hope, Despair, and Memory” Resource 2.1 “Hope Despair and Memory” by Elie Wiesel. Resource 2.2 Reading in Four Voices (Hope Despair and Memory. Resource 2.3 photographs: Jewish slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Jena, Germany. Resource 2.4 Student Response Handout for Day 1-Lesson2. UNIT: “HOPE, DESPAIR, AND MEMORY”. This unit teaches students about the importance of hope and remembrance during times of tragedy. Students explore the different ways characters and historical figures have embraced humanity and created civility as a response to injustice. Through the analysis of diction, tone, rhetoric, and the.
Guys, it's Real Talk time. We're more than happy to poke fun at some seminal speeches—remember when JFK told everybody in Germany 'I am a Jelly Donut?' ('Ich Bin Ein Berliner') or when Patrick Henry said 'Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!' and the rest of the thirteen colonies swooned and said, 'Ooh, that Henry is so metal'?
But the laughs are few and far between when it comes to Elie Wiesel.
Hope Despair And Memory Pdf
The deep respect? The awe? The feeling of being humbled before such intellectual power? The anger at the world? Oh, that's all there. But it's pretty much impossible to read Wiesel and get light-hearted.
Elie Wiesel was a victim of one of the most brutal atrocities in history—the Holocaust. Speaking to the Nobel Lecture conference in 1986, and more indirectly to the world, Elie Wiesel wanted his suffering and the suffering of others to have weight…and to be able to bring about change.
But here's the tricky thing about atrocities and suffering: to change them, you have to first remember them. And remembering that kind of heartache is horribly painful. It can shake someone's worldview completely to the core. Tragedy creates a kind of seesaw: you're pulled to remember and you're pulled to forget.
Remembering, though, is definitely the better of the two options.
In essence, Wiesel is saying that by keeping the memory of those who have suffered the worst of what mankind has to offer, we as a society will remember not to do those terrible things again.
It seems like it would make sense, of course, but the forty-odd years between the Holocaust and the time of Wiesel's speech weren't really characterized by peace on earth and good will toward men. The year 1986, Wiesel hoped, was the year where the lessons of the past would finally get heeded.
- Why do you think the Holocaust still is denied to this day?
- What similarities does Wiesel say that South Africa and Nazi Germany share, and what are important differences between the two? How does this comparison strengthen his argument?
- What, according to Wiesel, inspired the victims of the Holocaust to create so much literature?
- How can we best avoid future atrocities?
Hope Despair And Memory Essays
Elie Wiesel, by pondering whether the Holocaust was an outlier or a consequence of Western Civilization, alludes to a school of thought that really came into its own during the later years of the Cold War: Postmodernism. Postmodernist thought says that, given the history of the two World Wars as well as the atom bomb currently hanging over everyone's heads, Western Civilization isn't getting better as time goes on. In fact, every passing day it creates more tools to go on oppressing until it destroys itself…which it eventually will. Elie Wiesel hopes, as probably all of us do, that that won't prove to be the case.
Memory is tied up with a dangerous impulse: nostalgia. We'd like to remember things as better than they actually were, and we're often disappointed by the present when compared to our rosier pasts. In order to actually learn from mistakes, you need to remember clearly what they were in the first place, as painful as that can be.
Mankind, jewel of his creation, had succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new 'creation' with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. (6, 3)
Elie Wiesel invokes the time-old tale of mankind's hubris, but in this warped version the Nazi regime ends up building their tower straight to hell. This foreshadows a theme that he builds on through the next segment of the speech: how profoundly the Holocaust seemed to warp reality.
Men and women from every corner of Europe were suddenly reduced to nameless and faceless creatures desperate for the same ration of bread or soup, dreading the same end. (7, 9)
This is the worst consequence of forgetting. Without memories, you forget who you even are. If nobody remembers you, you're also stripped of your identity. Auschwitz and the other concentration camps sought to obliterate any traces of life before them, making its reality the only reality for the captives.
After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again. (19, 1)
Elie Wiesel hoped, then and now, that sharing that kind of memory will call people to empathize. Empathy, in its own way, is remembering the pain of others.
We must remember the suffering of my people, as we must remember that of the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people, Palestinians, the Mesquite Indians, the Argentinian 'desaparecidos'—the list seems endless. (26, 2)
After something like the Holocaust, it's so important not to take away the message: 'Boy, that sure was terrible, I'm glad it's over.' Similar atrocities have happened for centuries and they continue to happen, and while the Holocaust stands sharply in our memory, its victims' suffering shouldn't be the only suffering we remember. Microsoft office 2013 cracked version.
We may be powerless to open all the jails and free all the prisoners, but by declaring our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all jailers. (29, 3)
Even if we're powerless to challenge injustice, we shouldn't fail to speak out against it. As the old phrase goes, 'silence is an act of complicity.' If you push other people's suffering out of your mind entirely, then you make a decision to let them suffer silently. It's the call to memory that Elie Wiesel highlights in this speech.