"If I had a choice, I would not be your age now," he told the young people in the audience. "We are giving you ruins."

As he spoke these words, a sick and slightly disoriented woman with a walker was helped to an area of the gym that had been set aside as a media room. For the next 10 minutes, until paramedics eventually led her out a back way, she moaned tragically, providing an odd soundtrack to Wiesel's message.

"Chaos is the ultimate punishment," he said, "where all values are gone."

He asked the audience, "Where do we turn to find the beauty and innocence and safety of home?"

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 picture is gone," he said. "The nail is there."

Home is not just a place, he said. "Home is the person."

The title of this photo could be "Two Men Having Bad Hair Days." 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.

Because "to go away from home is part of our story," he said. "A society is judged by how it treats its strangers." Each one of us finds ourselves, at times, as the stranger, the displaced person.

Suddenly, from across the gym, a man began to shout in a booming voice: "What about the Palestinians?" And then, even louder: "You're a liar, Wiesel." He pronounced it "Weasel." Then, louder still: "Schindler's List is a lie!"

The police, warned of a possible disruption, alertly led him out.

"Well, well...," Wiesel replied calmly.

It was time for questions from the floor. A young man, his dark hair tied in a long pony tail, asked a question from what some have called a "revisionist" perspective -- casting doubts on the historical authenticity of the Holocaust. Why can't there be an "open debate," he asked, about the "open exaggeration" of the Holocaust? Members of the crowd shouted at him.

Wiesel did not look at the young man or acknowledge his question in any way. "Next question, please," he said.

A man stood and said he was part of the U.S. Army force that liberated the Dachau concentration camp. He said he did not know how people can deny what happened. "As a Christian," he said, "I am sorry."

A young woman, Asian-American in appearance, stood at a microphone. She identified herself as an 18-year-old high school senior. She said she had heard Wiesel last year and had to return to hear him again. She began to cry, and her struggle to speak brought tears to many in the crowd. Finally, she was able to say, "I want to tell you I admire you. You have touched people. I think you're a beautiful person."

Wiesel said, "I know your father must be very proud of you tonight."

An eighth-grade teacher told Wiesel that she assigned her class to read Night, Wiesel's memoir of his concentration camp experience. Her students wanted to know: "Did he lose his faith?"

"One must build on the ruins," he said. "The book was about my anger with God, not my disbelief. I quarrel with God. But after I quarrel, I pray. The tragedy of the believer is greater than the tragedy of the unbeliever."

Later, he autographed an original edition of Legends of Our Time, which he sent me to replace the copy I returned to Haim Horowitz, the rabbi I met on the train many years ago. I told Wiesel I was sorry that his talk was interrupted, but maybe it was a good thing to be reminded of the anti-Semitism left in the world.

"They have such boldness to show their faces," he said.

I walked across campus to my car. A piece of paper was tucked under the windshield wiper. I assumed it was one of those barroom advertisements: "Happy Hour! All drinks half-price!" Instead, it was a rather ominous-looking leaflet marked "STOP THE HATE!" in bold black letters.

It was distributed by a Tampa, Fla., group called the National Alliance. It attacked Wiesel, called him "a professional sufferer" and a "hatemonger."

The leaflet defended the German people, questioned the number of Jews killed during World War II, criticized "special interest groups" that supposedly control the media, and asked, "Is it that ONLY Jews matter?"

The book that proved Wiesel is a hatemonger, the leaflet stated, was Legends of Our Time, the book I was holding in my hand.

I sat in my car, dumbfounded. What I was reading felt like a desecration, an attack upon a book, written by one great rabbi and given to me, years ago, by another.

People in America, thank God, are free to tuck their hateful leaflets under our windshield wipers. But we are free to expose their lies to the light of day. For they should not be allowed to hide behind the banal label of the National Alliance, or disguise themselves as "historical revisionists" or even "Holocaust deniers."

To call them by their real names, we must use words like "Nazi" and "Fascist," and realize, that how blessedly few in number they may be, they still live among us.