"Someone pushed me. It was my turn. I ran without looking back. My head was spinning: you're too thin, you're weak, you're too thin, you're good for the furnace...The race seemed interminable. I thought I had been running for years...You're too thin, you're too weak...At last I had arrived exhausted."

These are the harrowing words of Elie Wiesel as he was forced to parade in front of Dr. Mengele and the SS officers of the Buna concentration camp. He was running like a madman (actually, he was all of 16 years of age) to simply avoid being selected as a candidate for the human furnaces that the Nazi's operated during the Holocaust.

Few stories have a far greater impact on my kids at school than this one- especially since they know that it's his memoirs- Night and not a piece of fiction. I told the kids that it took Wiesel ten years to come to terms with his horrific experience in the concentration camps. He tells us that he could not bring himself to write of the atrocities because he feared that his chosen words may betray the actual stories. However, he also had promised himself that if by some miracle he were to survive the death camps, he would devote his life to "testifying on behalf of all those whose shadows will be bound to mine forever." Having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Wiesel is unquestionably one of our contemporary heroes. However, have we learned the lesson? History would tell us No....human right abuses in Cambodia (Soviet Union), Bosnia and Herzegovina, and South Africa under the Apartheid regime- all of these are astonishingly similar to Hitler and his Nazi government.

Even today, it's still unfathomable that a country like Afghanistan instilled such harsh treatment of its own citizens- the Taliban and their quest for their own version of the Final Solution.

It can be so disheartening to read Wiesel's work with my kids and realize that we still don't get it. Wiesel's conviction is that to remain indifferent to the memory of the Holocaust is to participate in the same indifference and self-interest that allowed it to be carried out- which is why I think it is so incredibly important for us to read this account...so that we don't forget and maybe, just maybe, our next generation will do a better job than we have.

"In Germany, the Nazis first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me: by that time there was no one left to speak up." -Martin Niemoller