Book type: Autobiography
Preface: My first introduction to Elie Wiesel was his book Five Biblical Portraits, from a course on the Old Testament with one of my favorite professors in college, an old, gentle yet impassioned, former pastor and biblical scholar, and a German who had lived through World War II. Originally, I bought Night not knowing much of anything about Wiesel except that I’d liked his other book and this book was his first, and arguably, his most famous. Admittedly, I decided to read it this week mainly because it’s a mere 115 pages long. These were among the most emotionally charged hundred pages I’ve ever read and prompted me, once I’d finished the book, to go back and listen to a recording of my German religion professor telling his life story from the last day of one of his classes, a tradition for each class he taught–I heard this story around a half a dozen times and it affected me deeply every time, and this time was no different. Wiesel was an adolescent, torn from his home in Romania and forced into a concentration camp because he was Jewish; my professor had been a five year-old boy, forced to evacuate his home in Poland with his mother, grandmother, and siblings due to their German heritage (their family had lived in Poland for centuries before the outbreak of war in 1939). Their stories are very different, but they share similar threads: violence, discrimination, death, suffering, and survival. The lessons this week will be few; what can I say that could convey more than the stories from their own lips? My only purpose here is to hope that their stories reach a few more people who might otherwise never hear them or read them. In the introduction to Night, Wiesel says
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time (xv).
It’s not only a survivor who has no right to deprive future generations of the history of tortured Jews, refugees, gays, of the handicapped, of POWS, and everywhere, of children; no one has the right to be ignorant of this collective history, or to be silent about past horrors or present ones.
If there is a word that could encapsulate our time, now, it would be connection. We are able to connect, to share our experiences, and thereby to break the boundaries that separate us from one another with greater speed and ease than ever before. Given this reality, we have no excuse: we are required to pass along the histories of those who have suffered, in the hopes that our knowledge and understanding will help to prevent us from carrying out or being complacent to future violence.
Summary: Night is a succinct history of Elie Wiesel’s life in concentration camps, mostly still with his father, yet separated from his mother and sisters. (He would later be reunited with two of his sisters, but sadly, his mother and youngest sister Tzipora and his father all died at the hands of the Nazi guards and crematoria.) It is a story of great despair, of lost faith, and of humiliation, and yet, after having run for many kilometers near the end of the war, when they were not much more than skin and bones, Wiesel affirms their strength and ability to survive:
We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything–death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless, nothing but numbers, we were the only men on earth (87).
Lessons:
- “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere” (from Wiesel’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech printed at the end of the book, 119). I think we tend sometimes to think of violence in other countries as out of our reach because of cultural divides in addition to the obvious matter of physical distance. Undoubtedly this was the feeling of previous generations that did not speak out or act against the atrocities being committed all across the world during World War II (and every other war in history). And yet, we judge those who did not act to save the lives of their neighbors, of those transported to internment camps, concentration camps, extermination camps. We judge them for their inaction, their apathy, in the face of obvious inhumanity. History will judge us the same way. And in our age of technology and connection, we will have no excuses to give for why we did nothing, said nothing, when people were suffering near to us and far away.
- Be wary of simplified history and what it can do to your humanity. When we simplify the horrors of World War II, though it might seem like we’re empathizing with the victims, what we’re also doing is lessening the humanity of those who caused such suffering. When we make those people “monsters,” we tell ourselves that we could never become them, but surely that’s what so many people also thought before their neighbors were stripped of their jobs, then their homes, and finally their lives. We can never dismiss the possibility of our becoming apathetic to the suffering of others; we must, rather, stay vigilant to ensure we do not lose our concern for those around us. When we make an entire people out to be evil, we do the same thing to them that some of them had done to others. In the case of my professor, his family was German ethnically and Polish politically, and they were caught between advancing Russian and German armies and had lost many family members already and were frequently plagued by roaming bands of drunk, hungry, and ravenous soldiers who would rob them, assault them, and threaten their lives. And thus it was that outside, at his family’s barn, “a five year-old boy knelt and prayed for the peace of the world.” We must remember as many stories as we can, we must remember the inhumanity and the humanity alike. We can start with stories like Wiesel’s as a way of remembering, and by sharing them we break the silence that puts our humanity at risk.
A final review/recommendation:
There is no reason not to read Night. It’s brief, it’s powerful, and it’s a good first step in remembering the lives of those who were persecuted during World War II, whether they died in the cattle cars, in the work camps and the crematoria, or whether they survived as Wiesel did. People like Wiesel have undertaken the traumatic and burdensome task of putting their living nightmares into words. The least we can do is read them. Night is a good place to start.
Wiesel is pictured in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, near the upright pole at the back of the frame.
Photo credits:
Book cover: http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780374534752.jpg
Buchenwald Photo: http://www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/photo/lc/image/74/74607.jpg
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