Elie Wiesel, who died last year on July 2 at the age of 87, was probably the world's best known survivor of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II, having devoted the remainder of his life to educating the public about it and why it came about...and how to prevent it from ever happening again. In 1960 he came out with his book Night, which revealed his experiences as a teenager in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald Nazi concentration camps where he lost his sister and both of his parents...before finally being liberated at Buchenwald by the Americans on April 11, 1945. Unfortunately, there have been efforts from some quarters to deny that the Holocaust, responsible for the deaths of some six million European Jews, never happened. And there have tragically been other holocausts since then: in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, to name just three. Wiesel is no longer with us, but we do have this day in history to continue to remind us of the Holocaust: since 2005, the United Nations has designated January 27, the date in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day...
I chose the above quote of Elie Wiesel because it resonates so strongly with me. Many times I sit down to write and initially feel a sense of inadequacy about what I plan to express, as if I don't know what I'm writing about. But in a way, this can impart a sense of freshness to my writing as I work out, both in my mind and by doing research, those areas about which I am lacking in knowledge and understanding. I think it was Stephen King who wrote something about how important it is to write about things you don't know. How many of us would rather stay quiet instead of risking others thinking that we were ignorant about something?
