UpClose : Elie WeiselTed Koppel and Elie Wiesel have been friends for many years. Only Ted can begin an interview with such a prominent figure by asking about the Super Bowl. After all, their conversation was taped this week at a synagogue in St. Petersburg, Florida, a community where it's not easy to escape the buzz about the Buccaneers. Somehow, Elie Wiesel has managed to shut out the Super Bowl hype in a town enveloped by it. Elie Wiesel was only 15 when he, his sisters and parents were forced from their Romanian village and put on trains destined for the Auschwitz and then Buchenwald concentration camps. His memoir of that terrifying experience, Night, is a riveting and haunting record of man’s potential for evil. He lost 100 members of his family in the death camps, including his parents and one of his sisters. Tonight, he tells Ted Koppel why he couldn't speak or write about the experience for a full decade after he was liberated. Wiesel also weighs in on the current debate about how the United States and its allies should deal with Saddam Hussein. And on Wiesel's need to speak on behalf of all victims of human rights violations, he says, “As a Jew, I have no right to ignore other people's pain.” And why has he taken on such an enormous task as the elimination of human rights violations? ”I am against silence, when other people s suffering is so total, so offensive, so penetrating.” (19:56)
