Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, gave this impassioned speech in the East Room of the White House on April 12, 1999, as part of the Millennium Lecture series, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the summer of 1944, as a teenager in Hungary, Elie Wiesel, along with his father, mother and sisters, were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz extermination camp in occupied Poland. Upon arrival there, Wiesel and his father were selected by SS Dr. Josef Mengele for slave labor and wound up at the nearby Buna rubber factory. Daily life included starvation rations of soup and bread, brutal discipline, and a constant struggle against overwhelming despair. At one point, young Wiesel received 25 lashes of the whip for a minor infraction. In January 1945, as the Russian Army drew near, Wiesel and his father were hurriedly evacuated from Auschwitz by a forced march to Gleiwitz and then via an open train car to Buchenwald in Germany, where his father, mother, and a younger sister eventually died. Wiesel was liberated by American troops in April 1945. After the war, he moved to Paris and became a journalist then later settled in New York. Since 1976, he has been Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. He has received numerous awards and honors including the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also the Founding Chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial. Wiesel has written over 40 books including Night, a harrowing chronicle of his Holocaust experience, first published in 1960. At the White House lecture, Wiesel was introduced by Hillary Clinton who stated, "It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity.
Answer:
Happiness can be defined in a variety of ways and the key to finding happiness in life is to define what makes you happy and what you want to achieve.
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WHAT'S IN THIS ARTICLE?
Surround yourself with positivity.
Keep your values.
Express goodness.
Answer: What lesson can be learned from the story? What
does this story mean? These questions are all asking about a story’s theme. The term
theme can be defined as the underlying meaning of a story. It is the message the writer is
trying to convey through the story. Often the theme of a story is a broad message about
life. The theme of a story is important because a story’s theme is part of the reason why
the author wrote the story. The author has a message he wants to share with readers, and
he uses his story as a way to get that message across.
Readers sometime have difficulty expressing their ideas of what the theme of a story could
be. One reason for this is because understanding a story’s theme requires interpretation
on the part of a reader. Another reason may be the fact that a story might have more than
one message. When trying to determine the theme of a story, it helps to remember that
there are many recurring themes that can be found in literature—in other words, the same
theme can appear in many different stories.
When trying to identify the theme in a story, a reader can begin by examining the story’s
conflict. A reader can consider the following questions as she tries to determine the
author’s message:
• What is the problem?
• How does the character confront the problem?
• How does it turn out in the end?
• Why does it turn out this way?
• What lesson is to be learned from the way the character dealt with the problem?
