Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. No… - Elie Wiesel

What I don't like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, "Teach me mysticism." It's a joke.

I remember when I became a refugee. Of all things it was on a Saturday, on the Sabbath. The gathering took place in the synagogue because the enemies, in their perverted imagination, tried so to hurt us that they sought to commit the worst crimes in our holiest place. Therefore they gathered the Jews in my town, Sighet, into the synagogue. And it is there that the first humiliation occurred. We stood in line; there was a table with many gendarmes, feathers in their hats. We would come and give our papers. We were so naïve. We thought that we were protected by our papers. Therefore proudly we took out our citizenship papers certifying us as citizens of Hungary. May I tell you, my good friends, what we had to do in order to obtain those papers? I cannot begin to even tell you. I remember the pain and the anguish that some of us had to go through to prove that our great-great-grandfather was born in a particular village, or town. Finally, we got the papers, and we felt good about them. We felt safe. But then, when I approached the table, in the synagogue courtyard, the officer didn't even look at the papers. He took them, tore them up and threw them into the wastebasket. I thus became a refugee. That feeling of being a refugee lasted and lasted for many, many years — in fact, until I came to this country.

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.