Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who passed away on Saturday, July 2, 2016, dedicated his life to engraving the memory of the Holocaust into contemporary consciousness and fighting xenophobia and hatred in all of its forms. His indelible and timeless legacy, as applicable today as it was in the dark days of World War II, illuminates the human capacity for goodness even in the face of evil.

As Wiesel said in accepting his Nobel Prize in 1986, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.

During the Holocaust, this guiding principle was profoundly embodied by those righteous gentiles who took sides and risked their own lives to save hundreds of thousands of Jewish children from almost certain death. These children of yesteryear are the aging Holocaust survivors of today, among the last living witnesses of that courageous refusal to remain silent.

One can only hope that this critical lesson be remembered in contemporary times, as xenophobia and extreme nationalism sweep Europe, and as hundreds of thousands of refugees find themselves at a junction of life and death, far from their families and the places they once called home. The horrors faced by today’s refugees are different from those suffered during the Holocaust, as are the risks facing today’s bystanders, but one fact remains the same: it is all too easy for ordinary citizens to turn a blind eye to that which threatens or discomforts them.

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