Today at Buchenwald

Today at Buchenwald concentration camp, President Obama made a heartfelt speech about the ability of humankind to perpetrate evil and asked "for a just, peaceful and tolerant world; a world that has no place for anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, and right-wing extremism." You can read the whole text here.

But, when Elie Wiesel spoke, it was almost too much to bear. You feel the weight of his heavy heart, the weight of all of those he left behind, the weight of his bearing witness to the most heinous Holocaust, the sorrow in his all seeing, all knowing eyes. The passion and urgency in his plea for understanding and tolerance. His humanity. Take heed.

So, Elie Wiesel's call for all of us to come together, "where people will stop hating one another; where people will hate the otherness of the other rather than respect it.", touched on something very personal to me...opposing views on Israel within my own family that instigates the very intolerance he talks about. Without going into detail, my brother and I have not agreed on the Israeli/Palestinian issue for years; he on the 'extreme conservative' side, me on the 'liberal' (if you want to give them labels).

My brother's conservatism has so alienated him from me because he finds it, literally, intolerable that anyone could possibly not see things exactly as he does. Once, we did not speak for two years because he was disgusted by something I said. Since that time, we have managed to tentatively reconnect, mostly skirting talk about politics. But recently, it was too tempting for him not to comment on the subject, his voice was dripping with disdain. I didn't address his comment; rather I asked him - more like pleaded - to simply respect the idea that we could have differing opinions and still be 'friends'. I haven't heard from him since.

When will my own brother "stop hating" my "otherness", as he sees it, rather than simply respecting the idea that I can think a different way, and still be called human? I am sure that mine is not the only family to be going through this - a microcosm of the world's intolerance. If family is where intolerance starts, then how can we hope for anything bigger?

The full text of Elie Wiesel's speech follows.

MR. WIESEL: Mr. President, Chancellor Merkel, Bertrand, ladies and gentlemen. As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visit my father's grave -- but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.

The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there.

And I thought one day I will come back and speak to him, and tell him of the world that has become mine. I speak to him of times in which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will -- in America, where I live, or in Europe or in Germany, where you, Chancellor Merkel, are a leader with great courage and moral aspirations.

What can I tell him that the world has learned? I am not so sure. Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place, where people will stop waging war -- every war is absurd and meaningless; where people will stop hating one another; where people will hate the otherness of the other rather than respect it.

But the world hasn't learned. When I was liberated in 1945, April 11, by the American army, somehow many of us were convinced that at least one lesson will have been learned -- that never again will there be war; that hatred is not an option, that racism is stupid; and the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations, that will is meaningless.

I was so hopeful. Paradoxically, I was so hopeful then. Many of us were, although we had the right to give up on humanity, to give up on culture, to give up on education, to give up on the possibility of living one's life with dignity in a world that has no place for dignity.

We rejected that possibility and we said, no, we must continue believing in a future, because the world has learned. But again, the world hasn't. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.

Will the world ever learn? I think that is why Buchenwald is so important -- as important, of course, but differently as Auschwitz. It's important because here the large -- the big camp was a kind of international community. People came there from all horizons -- political, economic, culture. The first globalization essay, experiment, were made in Buchenwald. And all that was meant to diminish the humanity of human beings.

You spoke of humanity, Mr. President. Though unto us, in those times, it was human to be inhuman. And now the world has learned, I hope. And of course this hope includes so many of what now would be your vision for the future, Mr. President. A sense of security for Israel, a sense of security for its neighbors, to bring peace in that place. The time must come. It's enough -- enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for oceans. It's enough. There must come a moment -- a moment of bringing people together.

And therefore we say anyone who comes here should go back with that resolution. Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memories here not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary, a sense of solidarity that all those who need us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere who say the 21st century is a century of new beginnings, filled with promise and infinite hope, and at times profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task, which is to improve the human condition.

A great man, Camus, wrote at the end of his marvelous novel, The Plague: "After all," he said, "after the tragedy, never the rest...there is more in the human being to celebrate than to denigrate." Even that can be found as truth -- painful as it is -- in Buchenwald.

Thank you, Mr. President, for allowing me to come back to my father's grave, which is still in my heart.