In "The Perils of Indifference," Elie Wiesel talks about a young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains who was liberated from "a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald" in 1945 (2).

You know by now that boy is a young Elie, the teenager who survived Auschwitz because he lied about his age, who watched his mother and younger sister disappear toward the gas chambers, and who watched his father die only shortly before Buchenwald was liberated.

But you'll notice that it's only at the beginning and the end of his speech that Wiesel acknowledges his own experiences with tragedy and suffering—and he does that for a very specific reason.

The young Jewish boy serves as a symbol for all victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and all the people Wiesel talks about when he mentions "the failures [that] have cast a dark shadow over humanity" (17).

How big is this dark shadow, exactly? In the 20th century alone, it's huge.

11 million people were killed in the Holocaust, 6 million of those Jews. An estimated 800,000 people died in the Rwandan genocide. Some 100,000 died in Bosnia, and as many as 3 million people died in the Cambodian genocide. That's almost 15 million people killed in genocides—and we're only listing a few of the genocides that took place in the second half of the 20th century.

For comparison, if you combine the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston, the total is approximately 15 million.

And the number of deaths due to atrocity only increases when you consider the various civil wars and military conflicts that marked the 20th century.

So when Wiesel mentions the young Jewish boy in the beginning of his speech, he's offering some context for what he'll be talking about, a face to focus on as you're reading about (or listening to) the injustices so many people have experienced.

Then, at the end of "The Perils of Indifference," he brings back the image of the young Jewish boy, both as a reminder and as a call to action. For that young Jewish boy, and all the men, women, and children he represents, we have to do better in the next century.