Elie Wiesel's The Perils Of Indifference

Words: 757
Pages: 4
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Loren Vagts
Professor Anne Kennedy
English 102
24 August 2017
Elie Wiesel “The Perils of Indifference” Elie Wiesel accurately uses pathos in his speech about indifference to clearly express his message to his audience. Wiesel is successful in his use of pathos to deliver the speech about indifference. There are many examples of this in his speech and they will be critically evaluated to prove his successful use of pathos. The first example of his use of pathos is in his opening statement. Take for instance his memories to grab the audience’s attention with the following passage: “Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of …show more content…
Wiesel states “We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger.” He uses the belief in religion and God to describe the emotion of how he and others felt, when they were captive in the concentration camp.
In the next passages, Wiesel talks about their beliefs of that what was going on were secrets and that the rest of the world was unaware. “If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.” (Wiesel). He once again uses strong emotional like outrage and courage, knowing that if they knew they would have intervened.
Wiesel then references our emotional appeal to children. “We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony?” (Wiesel). His use of opened ended rhetorical questions pleas the audience to look inside of themselves and think about the message portrayed in his speech. He uses this to tie in the historical world events he mentioned earlier and the speech to make a larger emotional impact to the
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