Hope, Despair and Memory

South Africa today is a multiethnic democracy, but it was once a colony of the Dutch and then of the English. After fighting a war over the territory, the Dutch and English colonizers reached a truce predicated on their shared “white” racial identity and the subordination of other ethnic and racial groups (not just the various African peoples who had settled in the region at different times, but also people of Indian descent, many of whom were brought to the region as British indentured servants). This system of racial hierarchy was called “apartheid,” and Wiesel likens it to Nazism in its systematized racial classification and oppression. Wiesel also mentions Nelson Mandela, a South African man of the Thembu people, who at the time of Wiesel’s lecture was still serving a jail sentence for his opposition to apartheid.

The Holocaust, from the Greek “burnt offering,” refers when capitalized to Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of almost six million Jewish individuals. Jewish individuals also refer to it as “Shoah,” which in Hebrew means “catastrophe.” After seizing Jewish property and relocating the Jewish citizenry of Germany and its conquered territories to “ghettos,” the Nazis began planning the mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population in 1941.