Elie Wiesels Night Analysis - Essay Example

Your Book Review of Elie Wiesel’s “Night” This book is an autobiography of Elie Wiesel that essentiallytells the story of a young Jewish boy during World War II, and his struggle to emerge from the horrors of the Holocaust as a whole person. Elie and his family were living in Germany when the Holocaust began, and, as Jews, they were arrested in 1944 and kept captive in a place Elie describes as the “ghetto.” Soon after their arrest, Elie and his family were transported to the concentration camp in Birkenau where he and his father were separated from his mother and sister—males were sent to one camp, females to another. Elie later found out later that both his mother and sister were killed at the camp they were transported to. Elie and his father were sent to Auschwitz, a work camp, then from Auschwitz to Buna, and on to Buchenwald. While he and his father were in the concentration camp in Buchenwald, shortly before the war was over and the prisoners released. Elie’s father passed away from dysentery. There were many times when the young boy could think of no reason to survive the agony and pain of his life, yet his father’s memory and words kept him going. At a young age he was made to deal first with the death of his family, secondly with the death of his own childish innocence, and thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he was made to deal with the temporary death of the God he had always known and believed deeply in. His father begged him many times not to lose the faith of his religion as it would keep him strong, yet in the midst of his pain the young Elie wondered how there could be a God that allowed so much suffering. He started to doubt his own faith, and wonder just where God was, and why he could not hear the cries of the masses of tortured people. Elie begins his story by describing the ghetto where he and his family, along with many others from their community were held captives. Even at this juncture, after having been dragged from their homes and herded like cattle into an area surrounded by barbed wire, somehow these Jewish people were still hopeful for their futures, still believed their lives would be normal again one day soon. Elie notes that “Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward, everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.” (Wiesel 12). These delusions appeared to be all-consuming; perhaps the alternative of thinking what might be about to happen to themselves, friends and family, demanded a certain level of delusion. Elie speaks often in his book of the powerful emotion known as hate. While being corralled in the ghetto there were still those remaining few delusions--there was still some semblance of hope that their severely disrupted lives would somehow return to normal—whatever that was. At this point Elie and his family had no idea of what was to come in their lives, had no inkling of the beatings, degradations and brutal murders that awaited them. Then the German police burst into their lives, destroying those carefully cultivated delusions, dragging them from a place, that, while certainly not on the same level as their own comfortable homes, had come to offer a certain sense of safety, of constancy. Wiesel says that: “That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.” (Wiesel 19) Wiesel hung onto this hatred until it was replaced by an even more basic need— survival. From one concentration camp to another, Elie and his father were dragged, beaten, and herded, much sheep or cattle. When they could no longer continue marching, they were beaten and threatened with death. There existed the very real possibility, at any given moment in their lives that they could and would end up like so many of their friends and acquaintances. Many times Elie felt that it was just a matter of time before he, his father, or both of them would be sent to the mortally feared crematorium. At one point in their journey, another inmate came over to them and said, “Poor devils, you are heading for the crematorium.” (Wiesel 32). Wiesel, still merely a child, likely felt the fear clutch his very soul at this statement and says in his book that, “He seemed to be telling the truth. Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there...“Babies! Yes I did see this with my own eyes…children thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then sleep tends to elude me?)…I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?” (Wiesel, 32). I have to wonder how one could ever sleep the sleep of the innocent after witnessing a scene such as that. How would it be possible not to have nightmares for the entire remainder of your life, and how on this earth could you ever erase those memories of people, of children, being burned to death, being thrown into the flames? In perhaps one of the most moving and poignant passages from Elie Wiesel’s book, he describes with remarkable eloquence the feelings that threatened to overwhelm him as the men settled into their first night at their new home in a German concentration camp. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things; even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.” (Wiesel 34) I believe that those things are indeed the things that are never forgotten, whether in sleep or awake, the mind and heart can never let go of witnessing death, fearing your own imminent death, and of how very profound the silence at night must have been, how the hunger might eat at their bellies in the quiet of the night. It was during this time that Elie felt his God had been murdered along with his friends and family. He was unable to comprehend how a true God could allow such things to go on; therefore God must be dead as well. At this point in his life, Elie’s innocence has gone, and he is beginning to realize the sheer dreadfulness of his situation. He is scared, feels very alone and can both see and smell the smoke from the crematorium that is, in some gruesome twist of life, slowly burning the bodies of small children to nothing but piles of grey ashes. Wiesel feels the loss of his innocence deeply, and as the morning breaks he says: “The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded—and devoured—by a black flame.” (Wiesel 37) Even though he was not physically thrown into the fires, Elie felt that his soul had been burned to ashes just the same. It makes one wonder about the resilience of the human soul, and just how possible it really is for our souls to bounce back from tragedy, to rebound from acts so horrific as to be virtually unthinkable. I believe Wiesel is saying, in fact, that his soul was never the same after that night. His soul was devoured as he watched the black flames of death and destruction. The acts committed upon the Jewish people of the Holocaust are things we would find difficult, if not impossible to even imagine. For those who lived it, as time went on, the issue became simply one of survival, and all emotions were shoved somewhere deep inside; there simply wasn’t room for feelings, only survival from one day to the next. There was no looking ahead, no wondering what was to come, their entire lives were consumed by hunger and survival, the very most basic of human instincts. Elie noted this strange lack of emotion when talking about the hangings of other men in the concentration camps: “I watched other hangings. I never saw a single victim weep. These withered bodies had long forgotten the bitter taste of tears.” (Wiesel 63) I believe Wiesel was saying that tears were in fact a luxury not afforded to these near-corpses, and that their bodies were too tired to feel emotion and their souls were too shell-shocked. Barriers had to be built in the mind and heart in order to survive, otherwise they would all go mad, and that would bring certain death. Survival was all that mattered, all that existed in this crazy, mixed-up world. Wiesel writes about the transcending of the actual body due to extreme hunger, pain and cold. They were made to run from one camp to another at one time rather than being transported by train. They were all so tired, so sick, so frail, yet some tiny inner spark of survival instinct kept them putting one foot in front of another, time after time. “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.” (Wiesel 87). It became impossible for the men to realize that there were others on the planet who were still going about their daily lives as though nothing had changed, and, indeed, for them, nothing had changed. For the Jewish people, however, their entire beings were torn apart, and it became too painful to realize that perhaps no one cared about their pain, about their suffering. Wiesel’s father became sick, and his extreme thinness, due to near-starvation made it increasingly difficult for Elie to keep him alive. Though Elie gave his father part of his own rations of food and drink, his father’s health deteriorated rapidly. Dysentery was slowly draining his life, and Elie writes that “When I came down from my bunk after roll call, I could see his lips trembling; he was murmuring something. I remained more than an hour leaning over him, looking at him, etching his bloody, broken face into my mind.” (Wiesel 112). How difficult this must have been for a mere teenager; after surviving so much, now he could not stop the death of his beloved father. The next morning when Elie awoke, his father was simply gone, and another man was lying in his father’s cot. There was no funeral, no prayers, no closure, and Elie felt a deep sense of shame that he himself had been so very tired and hungry that when his father called to him, he only lay still on his cot, pretending to be asleep. Again, there was simply no room for emotions in this awful life they were leading. Elie writes “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...” (Wiesel 112). No longer required to take care of his ailing father, survival was forefront in his mind once more. Though he felt like there was nothing in his life that mattered after the death of his father, somehow Elie lived on until the day that the men in the concentration camp were freed. It was April 10th, and there were still some 20,000 people in the camp, several hundred of them children. The Germans were planning to evacuate the camp, then blow it up, presumably to destroy all evidence of the atrocities they had committed upon the Jewish captives. The resistance movement acted, and by noon the SS had fled. By six o’clock that evening “the first American tank stood at the gates of Buchenwald.” Though one would assume there would be such strong feelings of revenge among the remaining men who had been saved, Elie writes that, “Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That’s all we thought about. No thought of revenge or of parents. Only of bread.” (Wiesel 115). The men had been victims of starvation for such a very long time that food was the only thing on their minds. They were still unable at this point to think of their loved ones, to wonder who was alive and who had suffered a tragic fate. All they could process was that their hunger was finally being assuaged. Elie’s final words of his autobiography were these: “One day when I was able to get up I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). Wiesel looked into that mirror and did not recognize the face that stared back at him. When the Germans first evacuated the Jewish people from their homes Elie was still basically a child. He was a serious student with a deep abiding faith in his God. By the time the war had ended Elie was no longer a child in any sense of the word. He had seen atrocities that most of us cannot even imagine, yet he survived. Wiesel went on in his life to write over forty books, yet it took him nearly ten years after the end of the Holocaust to write about his ordeal. When asked why it had taken him so long to speak of his survival, Wiesel said that “You can be a silent witness, which means silence itself can become a way of communication. There is so much in silence. There is an archeology of silence. There is a geography of silence. There is a theology of silence. There is a history of silence. Silence is universal and you can work within it, and its own context and make that silence into a testimony. (Interview 1). I believe the things Elie had endured would have made it difficult if not impossible to speak of them openly. Like victims of sexual abuse who feel some dredges of shame, who are afraid to speak openly of their pain lest the emotions overwhelm them, Elie maintained his silence until the time he could look it in the eye, be unafraid, and tell his story. Silence was his protector, and by his very silence he was, in some way, giving his testimony. Elie goes on in his interview to describe how he writes about victims in his books. While he is silent and listens to them tell their stories, he has a deep realization that his silence does nothing to help victims of tragedy. He states that: “Therefore, all my adult life, since I began my life as an author, or as a teacher, I always try to listen to the victim. In other words, if I remain silent, I may help my own soul, but, because I do not help other people, I poison my soul. Silence never helps the victim. It only helps the victimizer. I think of the killer and I lose all faith. But then I think of the victim and I am inundated with compassion. (Interview 2). When Elie thinks of the victims of pain, both physical and mental he feels he must break his silence and tell his own story. Yet when we think of the victimizers in the world, he feels he has to preserve that silence so as not to give them a certain power over the victims. Wiesel’s little book, Night, became an instant sensation after landing on Oprah Winfrey’s book list. Unfortunately, the cloud left by the fiasco of another of Oprah’s books, “A Million Little Pieces,” by Stephen Ambrose, seemed to spill over a bit onto Wiesel’s own book. Ambrose, as it turns out, seems to have done some rather extensive plagiarizing, and, after such high praises for his book Oprah found herself in the unenviable position of having to defend Night as well. There were those who even declared that Wiesel’s book was a novel rather than an autobiography. Wiesel himself joined in the discussion, obviously irritated, though with a fair amount of justification in his feelings. "But it is not a novel at all," he told the Times, adding, "I know the difference." And quite likely he does indeed know the difference. Wiesel has written several novels, and has, in addition, written the sequence to Night, called Dawn. (Tracy 3). For those who attempt to deny the authenticity of the Holocaust, Tracey notes that “Night is one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal against those who diminish or deny the Holocaust.”(Tracy 5). Wiesel’s heartfelt, simply and starkly told autobiography seems to clearly destroy those who would question whether the Holocaust actually happened. Who could possibly, or would in our wildest imaginings, make such things up? On the other hand, Night has its own critics as well. In “A Prominent False Witness” Robert Faurisson writes that “That Wiesel personally survived was, of course, the result of a miracle. He says that in Buchenwald “they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate.” Why?” ( Faurisson 6). The point Faurisson makes is that as many times as Wiesel was so incredibly close to death, why was he never actually killed? His theory being that there is just no reasonable way Wiesel was almost killed so many times-- the odds were just too extreme to believe that he survived when so many others did not. I think Faurisson is missing the boat somewhat on this theory. After, all, a survivor would hardly be called a survivor unless he actually had beaten the odds and lived to tell about it. The second reason Faurisson gives for not believing the story as told by Wiesel in Night is that Elie Wiesel “claims to be full of love for humanity. However he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred. In his (Wiesel’s) opinion: “Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy, virile hate—for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.” (Faurisson 3). Thus Faurisson feels that while Elie Wiesel believes each and every Jewish person who lives today should hang onto the hate for the German people and the acts committed by them against the Jews, and that to do otherwise would be to betray the thousands who died at the hands of the Germans, he still claims to be a loving humanitarian, and the two do not mesh. I believe that Elie Wiesel’s book is a very powerful narrative, and, though short in length, completely grips the reader’s heart and gives them a horrifying glimpse into World War II. Like “Shindler’s List,” the book pulls no punches, however I personally found a hint of detachment in Wiesel’s story. Perhaps because he was merely a young teenager at the time, he was able to detach himself from the reality of his situation a little more than an adult might have. An adult might have had full realization of what was happening as well as what would likely be their own fate. While Elie certainly missed his mother and sister and mourned them, he showed a certain amount of impassiveness when confronted with their deaths. With his own father, though it is easy to see how very much Elie loved him, and how much his father’s words kept him going, his death was in some strange way a relief for Elie because he no longer had to worry about his dad as well as himself, and could focus entirely on self-preservation. I believe the survivors of this war must have so many mixed feelings as they wonder “why me?” There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to explain why so many died and some lived. I think Elie knew on some level that any day at any hour, it could be his turn to be shot, or be sent to the crematorium, yet the instinct for survival was strong. He showed a tremendous amount of courage and resilience, and continued on in his life to contribute something to the world in the form of his writing. Though one of his critics noted that he harbored hatred for the German race while preaching humanitarianism, I don’t se how any human being who had gone through the things he did could not, realistically, harbor some hatred and desire for revenge. Overall I richly enjoyed this book, though it was very emotional reading, the story and the manner in which it was told made it a book that would never be forgotten. Works Cited Faurisson, Robert. A Prominent False Witness. Institute for Historical Review, 2005. Date of Access April 22, 2006 at: http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/wiesel.shtml Interview of Elie Wiesel. Nobel Prize for Peace. Sun Valley Idaho, June 29, 1996. Date of Access April 19, 2006 at: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/wie0int-1 Tracey, Marc. Night and Frey: The Politics of Oprah’s Book Club. The Current, Spring 2006. Date of Access, April 20, 2006 at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/current/articles/spring 2006/tracy.html. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1985. Read More