Shaming the present with the past

Standing before the six glass towers of the New England Holocaust Memorial, Elie Wiesel called it ''an event that brings shame to civilization."

The survivor of Nazi death camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz was speaking, of course, about the systematic annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II. But he also was speaking of the indifference of a world that too easily casts a jaundiced eye toward human suffering, in particular, he said, the massacre of some 300,000 people in the Darfur region of western Sudan.

''Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, and, of course, you wonder, what happened?" Wiesel said. ''Why are so many communities indifferent to so many people's pain and death? All of these could have been prevented. Believe me. You know it. Why weren't they?"

At a ceremony last night rededicating the Holocaust Memorial 10 years after it was built, speakers including Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Wiesel, and Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, co-pastor of the Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain, asked Americans to stop what they called another genocide unfolding in Darfur.

It was, they said, a way to honor the victims of the Nazis, who perished while world leaders dawdled. Speakers repeatedly invoked the phrase ''never again" -- often used to remember the lessons of the Holocaust -- in calling on political leaders and citizens to take action to end bloodshed in that region of Africa.

''Whenever a person says, 'I need help,' woe to those who refuse to help," said Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his efforts against genocide worldwide.

White-Hammmond asked the audience, which included Holocaust survivors, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, City Council President Michael Flaherty, and numerous Jewish community leaders, to hold hands and pray for peace. Speaking of the rape, murder, and displacement of thousands of men, women, and children at the hands of government-backed militias in Darfur, she said, ''my outrage is exponential."

''Meanwhile, much of the world continues to engage in merciless hand-wringing and relative silence, which is tantamount to complicity," she said.

The memorial was built in 1995 next to Faneuil Hall, on the red-striped Freedom Trail. Thousands of people have passed through its towers, meant to evoke the smokestacks of the Nazi death camps and the 6 million dead. At the ceremony, a children's choir sang, ''Don't let the light go out," and passersby from Faneuil Hall stopped to watch and listen.

''This is simply a place whose impact is profound," said David Lamere, cochairman of the event and vice chairman of Mellon Financial Corporation.

The ceremony was unsettling for some of the survivors in the audience.

''Whenever we look at that monument, we remember the 6 million dead," said Tania Lefman, 76. A Wellesley resident, she said she survived the Nazis by hiding in the woods. ''For me, it brings back memories of the war that we went through," she said.

Hannah Lushan, 77, who said she was a slave laborer in several Nazi work camps, sat in one of the folding chairs reserved for survivors. ''It's an obligation to come and remember," she said.

Hyme Hipsman, 80, a West Roxbury resident, said he had survived the Nazis by hiding in the woods in Poland with resistance fighters, though much of the rest of his family was killed. ''What I went through, you could never forget," he said.

Wiesel asked why Americans seem to respond so quickly and generously to natural disasters, such as the tsunami in Asia and Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast, and yet sometimes ignore the plight of people suffering at the hands of others.

He recalled seeing a Katrina survivor on the news who had lost everything save for the T-shirt he was wearing.

''How can we go on having our meals quietly, when this man said, 'That's all I have, ruins,"' Wiesel asked.

Volunteers at the ceremony passed out cards asking people to ''take 5 minutes to do 5 things for Darfur." They included becoming educated on the issue; sending a letter urging Congress to take action; calling President Bush for the same reason; donating to relief organizations; and informing friends and others about the issue.

''Sadly," said Barbara W. Grossman, a Tufts University theater professor who cochaired the commemoration, ''as the death toll widens in Sudan, we know that the evil of racial hatred did not end with the Holocaust. When will this unending chronicle of human suffering come to an end?"