The Pearls of Indifference Rhetorical Anaylisis

Jack Grossman AP Lang. and Comp. Ms. Williams January 6, 2015 Top 5 Speeches/ RASAR: “The Perils of Indifference,” by, Elie Wiesel
Top 5 Speeches
1. Jim Valvano 1993 ESPYS speech
a. March 3, 1993
2. Lou Gehrig Farewell to Baseball speech
a. July 4, 1939
3. Eliezer (“Elie) Wiesel “The Perils of Indifference”
a. April 12, 1999
4. FDR’s First Fireside Chat
a. March 12, 1933
5. Ronald Reagan’s 40th Anniversary of D­Day speech
a. June 6, 1984
Summary
In the speech, author Elie Wiesel discussed the impact of indifference in 20th century society.
Wiesel discusses how people used indifference during World War 2, from Germans to
Americans to even President Roosevelt. Wiesel also discussed how the world has seemed to become more active since then, such as the decision by the U.S. and NATO to intervene in
Kosovo.
Analysis
Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor from World War 2. Wiesel gave his speech, “The Perils of
Indifference,” in Washington D.C. on April 12, 1999 in front of President Bill Clinton, Wiesel speaks about how the role of indifference impacted the 20th century, including World War 2 and the Holocaust. To support his claim, Wiesel uses anecdotes to connect personally to the reader.
Wiesel also successfully uses questions to move his argument forward. Wiesel also uses imagery to emotionally appeal to the audience. Throughout the speech, Wiesel uses anecdotes to personally connect to the audience and to hook the audience. To open his speech, Wiesel said, “Fifty­four 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 eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.” In this anecdote, Wiesel is referring to

himself after American troops liberated his concentration camp from the Nazis. Wiesel uses this anecdote to hook the audience and get them interested in the rest of his speech. Wiesel used another anecdote later in his speech when he said, “In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps...but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten.
All of us did.” In this instance, Wiesel uses this anecdote to show how the people in the concentration camps and the ghettos felt; that they felt like nobody cared about them. This was another use of an anecdote as pathos to appeal to the audience. Wiesel was able to use questions to further his argument in his speech. Wiesel did this by asking rhetorical questions, and by asking more complicated questions. In the speech, Weisel asks rhetorical questions to appeal to the audience. Wiesel speaks about the consequences of war for children and said, “What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably.
When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas?
Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.”
Here, Wiesel uses three questions, and two rhetorical questions, to emotionally appeal to the audience. In the two rhetorical questions, Wiesel knows that the adults are ignoring the children when he asks the question, but they make his argument stronger by asking those questions because they have a deeper meaning behind them. In the speech, Wiesel also asks deeper, more complicated questions that leave the audience wondering what the answer is. In his speech,
Wiesel talks about how President Roosevelt did not allow the boat the St. Louis unboard Jews into the U.S. In his speech, Wiesel said, “The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point.
Sixty years ago, its human cargo ­­ nearly 1,000 Jews ­­ was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of
Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps.
And that ship, which was already in the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don't understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help.
Why didn't he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people ­­ in America, the great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don't understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?” Wiesel asks three questions in this paragraph to get the audience thinking about why
Roosevelt showed indifference. Wiesel asked these questions that did not have an answer to leave the audience wondering, and it worked. In his speech, Wiesel was able to use imagery as pathos in his speech. Wiesel talks about how people in the concentration camps would give up and virtually be dead, even though they were technically still alive. Wiesel said, “Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the "Muselmanner," as they were called. Wrapped in their torn

blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were ­­ strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.” Wiesel’s words of the
Muselmanners paints a picture of them sitting on the ground in the torn blanket and looking blank into the audiences heads. The image is able to emotionally appeal the audience. Another example of imagery that Wiesel uses in his speech is in the first paragraph of his speech. Wiesel said, “Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw.
And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also 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.” In this example, Wiesel is able to paint the image of the soldiers’ eyes into the audience, so that the audience can better understand what Wiesel is explaining. Wiesel improved his argument in different ways. Wiesel was able to use anecdotes to hook his audience and ask questions to move his argument forward. Furthermore, Wiesel used imagery to paint images of what he was saying into the heads of his audience.

Reaction
I found this speech to be extremely interesting. I really intrigued about how Wiesel said that
FDR was indifferent during the Holocaust. In his speech, Wiesel said that FDR would not allow the boat the St. Louis into the port in the U.S. and the ship was forced to go back to Nazi
Germany. Wiesel also talks about how Allied troops did not bomb the railroad tracks to the concentration camps, which I agreed with. Even though the Allies wanted to preserve evidence, I think that they could have saved more lives by bombing the train tracks. I really identified with this speech on a more personal level because when I was in the 6th grade,
Elie Wiesel actually came and spoke to my Hebrew School class. He told us about his journey during the Holocaust and that was really cool. It gave me much more of a personal connection to the beginning of this speech that I’m doing the RASAR on about him right after the Holocaust because he actually went into quite detail about it when he spoke to my class, so I found that to be really cool.