It Is Impossible to Remain Silent

Elie Wiesel, Peggy Frankston, Jorge Semprun, Radu Ioanid

"On March 1, 1995, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, ARTE (a French-German state-funded television network) proposed an encounter between two highly regarded figures of our time: Elie Wiesel and Jorge Sempru n. These two men, whose destinies were unparalleled, probably had crossed paths, without ever meeting, in the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in 1945. This short book is the entire transcription of their recorded conversation. During World War II, Buchenwald was the center of a major network of sub-camps and an important source of forced labor. The camp interned mostly German political inmates, but held 10,000 Jews, Roma, Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, and German military deserters. In these poignant pages, Wiesel and Sempru n discuss the human condition under catastrophic circumstances. They review the categories of inmates...