"Why? My God, why? Why did it happen?" Wiesel said. "The senselessness for a man to get up in the morning and say, 'I'm going to kill people I've never met. I'm going to create widows, orphans.' What did he want to achieve? What did he want to obtain? What did he want to prove?"
There are no easy answers, he said, but one thing is clear: To combat terrorism, the world must teach its children the path to tolerance.
Wiesel, who was born in Transylvania in 1928, is a survivor of Nazi camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The recipient of a variety of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, he received the Nobel Prize in 1986.
Speaking at OCU's Henry J. Freede Wellness Center, Wiesel explored the fanaticism common to a host of history's enemies, including the Nazis, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the terrorists who struck New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
"The fanatic, therefore, uses hatred as a weapon, and you know, hatred is contagious," Wiesel said. "Hatred goes from cell to cell like a cancer -- and even from group to group unless it is checked."
That hatred turns lonely people to violence, he said. To stop it, "education must be a major part of the answer."
Learning that much came at a steep price. When he was a boy, the Nazis separated him from his mother and sister. He never saw them again. For the next year, he and his father labored in the camps beaten, half-starved and ill-protected from the weather. Near the end of the war, his father perished.
About 10 years later, Wiesel wrote a book, "And the World Kept Silent," about his wartime experiences. He has since become a champion in the fight against oppression and an advocate of hope.
"I belong to a traumatized generation that often felt abandoned by God and betrayed by humankind," Wiesel said. "And yet I believe that one must never estrange oneself from one or the other. I belong to a generation that learned that whatever the question, despair is not the answer."
Wiesel's lecture came on a Day of Sharing, part of the national Week of Hope surrounding the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. It also was part of OCU's Distinguished Speakers Series. Co-sponsors include the Jewish Federation of Greater Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma City Jewish Foundation and the Interfaith Alliance of Oklahoma.
