He told a story about his own return home to a Romanian village in the years after the Holocaust. He found everything the same in his house except for one detail. A picture of his rabbi was missing from the wall of his room. The nail is there. Home is not just a place, he said.
Home is the person.
But here I am with Elie Wiesel, chronicler of the Holocaust and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. On this evening, he signed for me a copy of his book, Legends of Our Time . Just an hour of so earlier, his talk before a college audience had been interrupted by Neo-Nazis. A society is judged by how it treats its strangers. Each one of us finds ourselves, at times, as the stranger, the displaced person.