The paradox here isn't that memory breeds both darkness and hope—that's the surface. Rather, Wiesel locates our moral obligation *within* the despair itself, not as an escape from it. He's saying that to remember atrocity fully is to feel its weight completely, and from that honest reckoning comes not relief, but *responsibility*. A Holocaust survivor who encounters a rising nationalist movement today faces this exact tension: the historical memory that threatens to overwhelm can, if honored rather than fled, become the very thing that steadies the hand to act.