By: Brian Freeman
The Holocaust is one of the most important and horrific times in the history of mankind. Never has the world seen a group of people singled out from society and executed with mass precision as seen during the Holocaust. The shock and terror which the Jewish people faced under Nazi rule can never truly be understood. The survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust have made countless efforts to try to give the world some kind of description of what they experienced. Millions of testimonies and literary works have emerged trying to describe the Holocaust to mankind. One piece of literature that stands out as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature is Elie Wiesel’s Night. The story ranks alongside Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl as one of the best in Holocaust literature. The one hundred nine page story is a simple but devastating account based on Wiesel’s personal Holocaust experience.
Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a village in the Carpathian Mountains in northern Transylvania. Elie Wiesel is the author of more than forty celebrated works of fiction and nonfiction. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America Congressional Gold Medal, the French Legion of Honor, and in 1986 was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Night is the first book in the trilogy Night, Dawn, and Day. The books reflect Wiesel’s state of mind during and after the Holocausts. Wiesel was only fifteen when the tragic story of Night unfolded. In order to describe this journey, Wiesel uses a sparse and fragmented narrative style with frequent shifts in point of view. This style of writing really allows the reader to almost feel the emotional and physical pain Wiesel describes.
Northern Transylvania, where Wiesel had been born and raised, was annexed by Hungary in 1940. Wiesel lived there with his Father Shlomo, his mother Sarah, and his three sisters Hilda, Beatrice, and seven year old Tzipora. He was raised in a close knit community of 10,000 to 20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Wiesel was a deeply observant, studied Talmud and yearned to learn all the religious Jewish books. Moshe the Beadle is one of the major characters in Night and sets up two major recurring themes. Moshe is the caretaker in the synagogue and teaches the Kabbalah and the mysteries of the universe in secret to Elie. The first theme Moshe introduces in Night is that spiritual faith is sustained not by answers, but by questions. One day all the foreign Jews are gathered and deported, and Moshe is sent away. Time passes and Moshe returns no longer the same. He runs from Jewish household to household begging for them to listen. Moshe tells them how Gestapo made them dig their own graves and murdered all the Jewish men, women, and children. Time passes on and Moshe’s words are forgotten, which leads to the second theme Moshe introduces. The second them introduced is that the Jews of Sighet and Eliezer were given many warnings and many opportunities to escape the hell.
Even when Germany invaded Hungary at midnight on March 18, 1944, few believed they were in danger. At first the Germans seemed polite and hospitable. On the seventh day of Passover the curtain of hatred was lifted and restrictions on Jews gradually increased. Gold, sliver, and valuables were no longer allowed to be kept by Jews. They were not allowed to visit restaurants, attend the synagogue, or leave home after six in the evening. Eventually they would be forced to distinguish themselves from society by wearing the yellow star of David at all times. Elie’s father makes light of this when he states, “The yellow star? Oh what of it? You don’t die of it…(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)” (11).
The wearing of the star was just the beginning of the cruel injustices placed on the Jews during the Holocaust. Night goes on to tell how Elie, his family, and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos created in Sighet. “The people thought this was a good thing. That they would no longer have to look at all those hostile faces, endure those hate-filled stares. No more fear. No more anguish. We would live among Jews among brothers…” (12). Two weeks later the German secret could no longer be kept. All the Jews in the Sighet would be deported. The forced Jews marched to a train station where a convoy of cattle cars awaited them. With eighty people to a car, little bread, and a few pales of water, the journey to hell began.
Elie arrives with his parents and sisters in Poland at Auschwitz Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II. Men and women are separated on arrival -- Elie and his father to the left; his mother and sisters to the right. Elie would learn that his mother and Tzipora had been sent straight to the gas chamber. The remainder of Night describes Wiesel’s desperate efforts not to be parted from his father and to survive. Wiesel’s attempt to stay close to his father causes him grief and shame at witnessing his father’s slow decline into helplessness. He becomes his father’s caregiver, but his father’s existence threatens his own existence. It is through this struggle that Elie loses his innocence and faith in God.
He managed to remain with his father as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the closing days of the war. Just a few weeks after the two marched to Buchenwald and before the camp was liberated by Allied forces, Wiesel’s father suffered from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion. The last word his father spoke was “Eliezer” (111). His father was taken away to the crematory in the middle night of the without him even knowing.
Wiesel’s story of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp paints a picture of such horror that at the end the reader asks, “Why?” Elie Wiesel wanted the world to know what he saw and experienced as a young boy and how it colored his world forever. He lost his entire family to the Nazis and came away from the concentration camps a survivor but a bitter and disenchanted one. Throughout the book, there is a dark feeling of hopelessness and unreality. It seems difficult to believe that anyone could be so vile and utterly devoid of conscience to send millions of Jews to their deaths. The Holocaust tested those who survived and left them with questions that cannot be answered. Elie Wiesel does not give us the answers, but gives a story of one man’s witness to the death of God, children, innocence, and self.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958.
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