A Plea For The Dead By Elie Wiesel Analysis

In his excerpt, A Plea for the Dead, Elie Wiesel discusses the inability of those who were not directly a victim of the Holcaust to truly understand it in its entirety – all encompassing its emotional, mental and physical ramifications. Anecdotally, Wiesel discusses a conversation with a judge from the Eichmann trial, in which he questions, “given your role in this trial, you ought to know more about the scope of the holocaust than any living person…do you understand this fragment of the past, those few pages of history,” (pg. 143) to which the judge replies “No, not at all. I know the facts…but this knowledge…has nothing to do with understanding” (pg. 143). Fundamentally, this introduced an inconvenient reality when discussing the Holocaust: