Famous quotes from Elie Wiesel

“Some stories are true that never happened.”  Elie Wiesel

The above quote is from brainyquote.com which you can read here.

The quote is also written as

“Some events do take place but are not true;
others are, although they never occurred.”

How should we interpret this?  Does he mean that a person, who was never in Auschwitz or Buchenwald, can write a book and claim that he was there?  Because some things are true, although they never occurred?

What events took place, but are not true?  Maybe the gassing of prisoners, which took place, as everyone knows, although this event is not true.

If you deny that the gassing of prisoners took place, even though it is not true, you will go to prison in these countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Switzerland.

My favorite quote from Elie Wiesel is this one, which he wrote in “Legends of Our Time” in 1968, after a visit to Germany:

“There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate. Yet today, even having been deserted by my hate during that fleeting visit to Germany, I cry out with all my heart against silence. Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy, virile hate–for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.”