Sasha is writing an argumentative essay in support of the following thesis: Because violations of human rights, genocide, fanati
cism, and terrorism continue to claim lives on nearly every continent, it is clear that the world has learned little from the horrors of the German death camps. The topic sentence of one of her body paragraphs reads: The slaughter of innocents during WWII was sanctioned and even carried out by people who were somehow able to push away all that they had ever learned about right and wrong. Which excerpt from Elie Wiesel's speech "Hope, Despair, and Memory" would best support her claim? "Fear dominated the universe. Indeed this was another universe; the very laws of nature had been transformed. Children looked like old men, old men whimpered like children. 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." "All those doctors of law or medicine or theology, all those lovers of art and poetry, of Bach and Goethe, who coldly, deliberately ordered the massacres and participated in them. What did their metamorphosis signify? Could anything explain their loss of ethical, cultural and religious memory?" "The next question had to be, why go on? If memory continually brought us back to this, why build a home? Why bring children into a world in which God and man betrayed their trust in one another?" "Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered."
