Wiesel closed his Dartmouth address by quoting Albert Camus's novel The Plague. In the novel, Dr. Rieux surveys a devastated city, thousands dead from the plague, and yet concludes that there is more in any human being to celebrate than to denigrate. Wiesel repeated the line twice, letting it hang in the air. For a man who had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, who had lost his father, mother, and sister to the Nazi death camps, and who had spent his life bearing witness to the worst that human beings can do to one another, this affirmation was staggering in its generosity. It was not naive optimism — Wiesel had told the graduates moments earlier that he still quarreled with God, and that the twentieth century was one of the worst in human history. But he chose, after everything, to affirm the human capacity for goodness. 'Let's celebrate,' he said. 'Thank you.'