'Now we know evil has power'

ST. PETERSBURG -- The question came on a white index card.

"If God exists, as I presume you believe, what is his point allowing 9/11 or the Holocaust to occur?"

Elie Wiesel, standing in front of an oak lectern with the Eckerd College seal and a row of potted mums, scanned the 1,600 people at McArthur Gymnasium. Then he turned back to Lloyd W. Chapin, dean of the Eckerd College faculty, who had just called him a prophet in his introduction.

"Now do I speak on behalf of God, too?" asked the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner. "The question should be, do I believe in the humanity of the human being."

And, of course, he does. Because that's what Wiesel does. He offers hope in the face of unnerving brutality.

Still, even Wiesel struggled Thursday night with recent events.

"Terrorists today readily kill children and parents and people they've never heard of, and that is new," he said. "There is no more romanticism today. Today it is nothing but cruelty and brutality and a passion for murder for the sake of murder."

He pointed out that terrorists do not send ransom notes or leave behind threats. They kill and say nothing. He reflected with sorrow on the death of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter killed by his abductors.

"I know what it means to face danger, but somehow I never felt the killers would do that, simply to take a journalist's life for no reason whatsoever, to take him away from his wife who is 6 months' pregnant and kill him? What did they mean to do by that?"

But even with the events of Sept. 11, Wiesel pointed out, there is hope. Even as U.S. leaders warn us to expect more attacks. Even as many wonder what happened to humanity.

The only way to combat fanaticism is to fight it, he said.

"It takes so little if we are not careful for terrorists to annihilate all that we who believe in civilization have tried to build," Wiesel said. "Now we know that evil has power and we now know that power must be countered."

Wiesel's numerous accounts of the Holocaust earned him the Nobel Peace Prize because as one judge said, "Wiesel has emerged as one of the most spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world."

Wiesel, 73, was born to an orthodox Jewish family in Sighet, Romania, near Transylvania. He spent time at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where his father died from starvation and dysentery. His mother and sister died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He survived the Holocaust and went on to write Night, one of the most widely read books in Holocaust literature. An outspoken supporter for the persecuted in the world, he lives in New York City and commutes to Boston University, where he is a professor of philosophy and religious studies.

"Terrorism is not what we want to accept as a way of life so there must be some hope," Wiesel said. "If not, what are we doing here?"

-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

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