WIESEL, WALESA AT AUSCHWITZ PROCLAIM RIGHT NOT TO SUFFER
Author: Associated Press
Date: Monday, January 18, 1988
Page: 5
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
OSWIECIM, Poland -- Nobel Peace Prize winners Elie Wiesel and Lech Walesa
stood before a monument at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp yesterday and
promised that a gathering of laureates would proclaim that human beings have a
right not to suffer.
It was only the second time Wiesel, a Boston University professor, had
returned to the camp where he was imprisoned as a young boy 43 years ago.
The two men met a day before the 43d anniversary of the camp's evacuation
by the Nazis. It was the symbolic start of a four-day symposium of nearly 80
Nobel Prize winners that begins Monday in Paris.
Laureates from 18 countries are to discuss topics ranging from human
rights and AIDS to nuclear disarmament and hunger. The conference is being run
by Wiesel's Foundation for Humanity and French President Francois Mitterrand.
Four other Nobel laureates were on hand for the tour of the former
concentration camp where 4 million people, more than half of them Jews, were
murdered by the Nazis.
Walesa, chairman of the outlawed Solidarity independent labor federation,
will not attend the Paris conference. He said he fears he would not be
readmitted to Poland.
But in remarks before the inscribed stone monument to the victims at
Birkenau, Wiesel said Walesa would be in Paris in spirit.
"It is here, where all hope ended, that we must proclaim to the world that
human beings are worthy of hope," said Wiesel, whose writings preserve the
memory of the Holocaust.
Addressing Walesa, he continued, "In this our friends and I say to you, we
will not forget you. You will remain here as our representative and we shall
be yours all over the world -- asking for all human beings the right not to
suffer."
Wiesel and Walesa then embraced. Walesa thanked Wiesel for his words and
pledged to visit Auschwitz again to try to understand it. The two death camps
are now a museum and memorial.
Before Wiesel's speech, Walesa said in a short speech that he wants to
draw special attention to the suffering of the Jewish people.
"In this land throughout the centuries the Polish and Jewish people lived
together through good and evil. The will of the oppressor ended this," he
said. "The human conscience must never forget."
With Wiesel were about 40 people, including the four other Nobel
laureates: Herbert C. Brown of the United States, who won the prize for
chemistry in 1979; Mairead Corrigan McGuire and Betty Williams Perkins of
Northern Ireland, who shared the peace prize in 1976; and Daniel Bovet of
Belgium, who won the medicine prize in 1957.
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