23 March, 2002

Night
Elie Wiesel
(Trans. Stella Rodway) 1960
109 pp

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moment which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Night is Elie Wiesel's memoir of his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. It starts out with the events leading up to deportation and internment of the Jews of Wiesel's town, and ends a year later with the liberation of Buchenwald (where Wiesel ended the war) by American forces. The book is a grim chronicle of the very worst parts of human nature, all of which we know about intellectually, but here, it's given a human face in the form of fifteen-year-old narrator Eliezer, who changes enormously over the course of the book.

At the beginning, before the Nazis, Eliezer leads a comfortable, middle-class life in the town of Sighet (at that time, part of Hungary). His father is a prominent member of the Jewish community, respected by all, if somewhat distant from his own family. Everybody in the community is content and unconcerned about what's going on in the world at large, to the point of being wilfully obtuse. When the foreign Jews are deported, it's taken in stride: "The deportees were son forgotten. A few days after they had gone, people were saying that they had arrived in Galicia, were working there, and were even satisfied with their lot." When one of the deportees returns, telling a horrifying tale of how the exiles had been forced to dig their own mass graves, and then were mowed down by German soldiers, nobody believes him-- they all scoff at him as a madman.

This insane, blind optimism persists through the German occupation of Sighet, confiscation of property, the yellow stars, formation of the Jewish ghettos, and even the final mass deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. It's only when they disembark from the train that the full horror of the situation begins to dawn on them, and even then, there's a strange lack of concern. When veteran prisoners tell the newcomers their fate, some of the new prisoners want to revolt:

There were a few sturdy young fellows among us. They had knives on them, and they tried to incite the others to throw themselves on the armed guards.

One of the young men cried: "Let the world learn of the existence of Auschwitz. Let everybody hear about it, while they can still escape...."

But the older ones begged their children not to do anything foolish: "You must never lose faith, even when the sword hangs over your head. That's the teaching of our sages...."

One of the central themes of this book is the reaction of a person of faith to a terrible situation which flies in the face of everything he believes. It's not a comfy story of how religious faith sustains a person through a time of trials. Rather, it's about how unmitigated horror destroys the illusions which were sustained by faith, and eventually faith itself. Prior to his arrival in Auschwitz, Eliezer is deeply religious; he studies the Talmud daily and prays regularly; he began delving into the religious mysteries of the Kabbala at the tender age of twelve. However, this is the blind, untested faith of a child, somebody who's never experienced anything contrary to his beliefs.

When he is confronted with this, with the apalling evidence that God is not infinitely merciful and just, that He will not protect his chosen people from annihilation, Eliezer's faith shatters like glass. The morning after his arrival in Auschwitz, he thinks, "I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it." Months later, during the prisoner's observance of the Jewish New Year, he muses on how he's changed:

Once, New Year's Day had dominated my life. I knew that my sins grieved the Eternal; I implored his forgiveness. Once, I had believed profoundly that upon one solitary deed of mine, one solitary prayer, depended the salvation of the world.

This day I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very stronf. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone-- terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy. I had ceased to be anything but ashes, yet I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long. I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger.

Ironically, as Eliezer's relationship with God disintegrates, his relationship with his father strengthens. While the book is told exclusively with Eliezer's perspective, one can easily imagine the father's pain and guilt, at having ignored all the warning signs, not having left Europe while his family still had a chance, and even refusing an offer of refuge. Eliezer never condemns his father for his poor judgement; he saves all his ire for the Germans and for the God who betrayed His people. Rather, the young man sticks by his dad throughout their time in the camps, until the old man succumbs to dysentery, and gets taken away to be killed.

The length of this post should indicate how thought-provoking I found this book, and how much it affected me. Science Fiction and Fantasy books which are praised for "gritty realism" often bore me, due to the unrelenting grimness of the plot, and gratuitous character torture. Night is certainly as grim as the grimmest fiction I've ever tried to read, but it didn't affect me the same way. Partly, I think, because it's physically, mercifully, short. The other difference is that it's true. This isn't some author making up depressing material about human cruelty for entertainment purposes; this is something which really happenned. That makes it important, and worth reading through all the misery.

One final note: this is the second book in the Chicago Public Library's "One Book, One Chicago" program. (The first was To Kill a Mockingbird, last fall, which I missed.) On one hand, I'm not into "book clubs," where a bunch of people all read a book, and get together to go over discussion questions reminiscent of high school English class (and not the Honors class, either). On the other hand, I have a secret fondness for shared civic experiences, be it cheering for a local team which makes the playoffs, enjoying silly fiberglass cows, or reading the same book as thousands of other folks. Plus, it's motivation to read good books I wouldn't otherwise.

This page Copyright P. Korda, 2002. kor2@midway.uchicago.edu