Nobel Peace Prize winner speaks during `Week of Hope'

Thursday, April 21st 2005, 5:47 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) A Nobel Peace Prize-winner who survived Nazi concentration camps said the world must teach children the path to tolerance if it is to combat terrorism like the Oklahoma City bombing.

Elie Wiesel spoke Wednesday night before about 2,200 people at Oklahoma City University as part of a national Week of Hope surrounding the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which killed 168 and injured more than 500.

Wiesel called the bombing ``a symbol of absurd cruelty and a man's obsession.''

``Why? My God, why? Why did it happen?'' Wiesel asked. ``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?''

Wiesel, born in Transylvania in 1928, is a survivor of Nazi camps in Auschwitz, Poland, and Buchenwald, Germany. Besides the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, he received the Nobel Prize in 1986.

Wiesel explored the fanaticism common to the Nazis, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

``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.''

As a boy, the Nazis separated Wiesel from his mother and sister. He never saw them again.

For the next year, he and his father labored in the camps and were beaten, half-starved and ill-protected from the weather. His father died near the end of the war.

About 10 years later, Wiesel wrote a book, ``And the World Kept Silent,'' about his wartime experiences.

``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.''