rBook Workshop 9 • Stretch Text
Content Area: World History
Text Type: Speech
SCAFFOLDING TRACKER
Text Complexity
Moderate 2
Skill: Make Inferences
1010L
Review/Reteach
Source: Eli Wiesel
Challenge/Stretch
The Perils of Indifference
Content Goals
• Make inferences using text
clues and prior knowledge.
• Identify the use of persuasion,
and analyze connotation
• Synthesize information about
the Holocaust from various
sources.
Teach
Language Goals
• Use academic language to
discuss historic events.
• Cite textual evidence to support
critical reading.
Distribute Pages 2–4, “The Perils of Indifference.” After students read
independently, discuss this question: Why does Eli Wiesel want his listeners to
remember the perils of indifference?
BUILD BACKGROUND
• Eli Wiesel was freed from a
concentration camp in Germany,
by American troops in April,
1945. He later moved to the
U.S. and became a professor at
Boston University.
• Wiesel has written more than
40 books. He is the recipient of
the Nobel Peace Prize and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
EXTEND
1. Apply Question 2: Students
can compare evaluations,
supporting their positions with
evidence and reasoning.
2. Cross-Text Analysis: Have
students apply Wiesel’s concept
of indifference to the writing of
Francisco Jiménez. Who treated
Jiménez with indifference? Who
showed compassion and helped
him survive?
In this speech, Elie Wiesel examines consequences of indifference in the history of the
20th century and questions what lessons the new century will bring. Have students make
inferences as they read by asking: Are there parts of the speech that give clues, but don’t
state exactly what the author is thinking? What can I add from what I already know? How can I
combine text clues with my knowledge to make an inference? Guide students to integrate
information in the speech with information about Eli Wiesel from the Anchor Video.
Guided Practice
Part 1 What does Wiesel mean by “their eyes told him what he needed to
know”? Circle a clue in the text. Then add your own knowledge from the video
to make an inference. (Text clue: “a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald.”
The soldiers’ eyes revealed their rage at seeing how the Jews were killed at
Buchenwald.)
Part 2 What images does Wiesel use to define indifference? (a state in which
the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn….) What is the
meaning of his metaphor? (Indifference keeps us from recognizing the difference
between good and evil and allows evil to occur in the world.)
Part 3 Why does Wiesel say that “Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end”?
Circle a clue in the text and make an inference. (Text clue: “And in denying their
humanity we betray our own.” Wiesel is saying that a person who is indifferent has
let his humanity die. It is the end for him as a compassionate human being.)
Part 4 What does Wiesel mean when he says about the children of war, “Do we
hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony?” Use clues in the text and
your own knowledge to make an inference. (Wiesel means that if we do not take
action to stop wars and help the children, we are being indifferent.)
Apply
Use Page 4 to have students make an inference about the ending of the speech
and then respond to the critical reading question.
For answers to all items, refer to the Answer Key (SAM Keyword: Stretch Text Answer Key ).
READ 180 • Stretch Text • Flex Workshop 9
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READ 180® Stretch Text
Name
rBook Workshop 9
Content Area: World History
Text Type: Speech
Source: Eli Wiesel
The Perils of Indifference
Part 1
Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy
from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke
up in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald.1
He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart.
He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he
remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he Eli Wiesel at one of his many
public-speaking events.
lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful
(© Alex Wong/Newsmakers/Getty Images)
to them for that rage, and for their compassion.
Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he
needed to know—that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President—Commander-in-Chief of the
army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others—and I am filled with a
profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Part 2
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the
legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new
millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and
metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two
World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations—Gandhi,
the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin—bloodbaths in Cambodia and
Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo
and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And,
on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so
much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A
strange and unnatural state in which lines blur between light and dark, dusk
and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
1. Buchenwald was a huge concentration camp in Germany
during World War II. Many thousands died there.
READ 180 • Stretch Text • Flex Workshop 9
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© Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 33331_17608
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel gave
this speech at the White House April 12, 1999.
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Name
rBook Workshop 9
Content Area: World History
Text Type: Speech
Source: Eli Wiesel
The Perils of Indifference
(Continued)
Part 3
Indifference is always the friend of the enemy; it benefits the aggressor—
never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The
political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees—not to
respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of
hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we
betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And
this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wideranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple
categories: killers, victims, and bystanders. During the darkest times, inside the
ghettoes and death camps, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
Part 4
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this century: the
defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel, the demise
of apartheid.
Have we learned from the past? Has society changed? Has the human being
become less indifferent and more human?
What about the children? We see them on television, in the papers, and we
do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic. When adults
wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their
eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain,
Words to Know
their agony? Every minute one of them dies of
chronic constant, persistent
disease, violence, famine. Some of them—so many
truant someone who is absent
without permission
of them—could be saved.
Together we walk towards the new millennium,
carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
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© Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 33331_17608
Of course, indifference can be tempting. It is much easier to look away from
victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our
dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in
another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or
her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless.
Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest.
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Name
rBook Workshop 9
Apply Activity
The Perils of Indifference
1. Make Inferences Eli Wiesel ends his speech with the words: “Together we
walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and
extraordinary hope.” Make an inference about his meaning of the words
“profound fear and extraordinary hope.”
What I Already Know
The meaning of “profound fear and extraordinary hope”
2. Evaluate Eli Wiesel warns us about the perils of indifference. Think
about your generation. Are most teens indifferent to pain and suffering in
the world or do they feel compassion? What about yourself? Express
your view and support it with examples from your own experience.
My generation is indifferent to / feels compassion toward
Use with Page 1.
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© Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 33331_17608
What I Learned
from the Reading