You may have heard one version or another of this quotation from a Protestant pastor living in Germany. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an entire page dedicated to it.

Niemöller's point is that keeping quiet while entire groups of people suffer around you makes you part of the problem. He was talking specifically to the German people, the ones who stood by and watched as the Nazis rounded up innocent people and marched them to ghettos or, even worse, attacked them in the streets. If they refused to speak out against that brutality, no one was going to be around to speak up for them.

In "The Perils of Indifference," Elie Wiesel has the same message. Millions of people died in the Holocaust, yet atrocities continued to happen throughout the rest of the 20th century, and those of us who aren't being persecuted have a responsibility, as citizens and as human beings, to speak up and fight back.