Remember the Tower of Babel? You know, that massive Biblical tower to heaven that mankind thought was such a good idea…until God smacked the tower down, condemned everyone in the world to speak in different languages, and taught everyone a lesson about messing with the man upstairs?

Yeah. Now turn that tower into a funnel:

Mankind, jewel of his creation, had succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new "creation" with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. (6, 3)

This metaphor, quite literally, turns the story of Babel in its head. In the original tale, man's hubris was just to see the face of God, to see if they could do it. The Nazis, on the other hand, built their colossal structures not to see God, but to become God: to be the almighty slaughterer. Auschwitz and the other camps were their dominion, where they set up their own rules. And of course, if the original Tower was built up to Heaven, its inverse was building straight down to Hell.

So why does Wiesel bring this up? Well, the original story had humans condemned to not understand each other…or at least to suffer through years of (gulp) intensive language classes. The new story, the story of the Nazis and the Holocaust, also had the aftermath of people unable to understand each other: the fact that atrocities continue to be committed stands as proof positive that people didn't understand the scope of the Holocaust.

After all, if people truly understood the Holocaust, they'd know how horrendous things like Apartheid and terrorism were, and they wouldn't do them.