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S40E1: Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire | Preview

Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire [ASL]

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Learn about Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winning author of Night. After his internment at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and liberation from Buchenwald, Wiesel became a journalist in France before immigrating to America. Wiesel fought the “sin of indifference” by writing, teaching, and speaking truth to power. This version contains on-screen ASL interpretation.

TRANSCRIPT

(AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE)

(speaker) When you ask people today, many don't know Elie Wiesel.

Time erases memories.

[gentle music] One of the things that every survivor has to face, and thus face today, is the fact of its own survival.

He somehow is ashamed of still being here.

[gentle music] (Elie) In my small town, I knew where I was.

I knew why I existed.

Now I no longer know anything.

As in a dusty mirror, I look at my childhood, and I wonder if it is mine.

It was my father who kept me alive.

We saw it together.

I knew that if I die, he would die.

At one point, I decided to write my testimony.

I wrote it for the other survivors, who found it difficult to speak.

I thought he would never have children.

(speaker) We had one date, and we both knew that it was going to be.

He had told me from the beginning he didn't want children.

I convinced him.

(Elie) What have I learned in the last 40 years?

I learned the perils of language and those of silence.

But I've also learned that suffering confers no privileges.

This is why survivors have tried to teach their contemporaries how to invent hope in a world that offers none.

Why I write?

What else could I do?

I write to bear witness.

[dramatic music] ♪