The theme addressed in both excerpts, especially from Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea, is that, Some truths are too difficult to fathom if one has not experienced them. Wiesel writes, 'We will never know all that happened behind those doors of steel.' He means that what did happen there was so terrible and hideous that the rest of us will never really grasp the suffering of those people even when someone tells us about it.