Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #1
We begin our retrospective with Night, Elie Wiesel’s first and most widely read work. This harrowing account of his experience as a fifteen-year-old in the Nazi death camps became a foundational work of Holocaust literature. It was first written in Yiddish (in a longer form as Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, or and the world was silent) while Wiesel, a young journalist, was on assignment in Brazil. Night in its current form first appeared in French as La Nuit(1958), after having been rejected by many major publishing houses. In America, the book slowly attracted critical attention in the 1960s and ‘70s, when Elie Wiesel became a public figure and university professor. Night is required reading in countless high schools and colleges. It has been translated into 30 languages and sold over 10 million copies.
In the new edition of 2006 translated by Marion Wiesel, the original dedication, “In memory of my parents and of my little sister, Tzipora,” is followed by a translator’s dedication: “This new translation is in memory of my grandparents, Abba, Sarah and Nachman, who also vanished into that night.”
In a new preface, moreover, the author writes that none of his subsequent books can be understood without this very first book. What do you think he meant by that? Here are his words:
IF IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind? Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, to help prevent history from repeating itself? Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one’s knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature? There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival. Was it to protect that meaning that I set to paper an experience in which nothing made any sense? In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer—or my life, period—would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory. (vii-viii)
Passage #1:
My parents ran a store. Hilda and Bea helped with the work. As for me, my place was in the house of study, or so they said.
“There are no Kabbalists in Sighet,” my father would often tell me.
He wanted to drive the idea of studying Kabbalah from my mind. In vain. I succeeded on my own in finding a master for myself in the person of Moishe the Beadle.
He had watched me one day as I prayed at dusk.
“Why do you cry when you pray?” he asked, as though he knew me well.
“I don’t know,” I answered, troubled.
I had never asked myself that question. I cried because…because something inside me felt the need to cry. That was all I knew.
“Why do you pray?” he asked after a moment.
Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?
“I don’t know,” I told him, even more troubled and ill at ease. “I don’t know.”
From that day on, I saw him often. He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer…
Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don’t understand His replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself.
“And why do you pray, Moishe?” I asked him.
“I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.” (22)
Passage #2:
SPRING 1944. Splendid news from the Russian Front. There could no longer be any doubt: Germany would be defeated. It was only a matter of time, months or weeks, perhaps.
The trees were in bloom. It was a year like so many others, with its spring, its engagements, its weddings, and its births.
The people were saying, “The Red Army is advancing with giant strides…Hitler will not be able to harm us, even if he wants to…”
Yes, we even doubted his resolve to exterminate us.
Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century!
And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manner of things—strategy, diplomacy, politics, and Zionism—but not with their own fate. (26)
Passage #3:
My father’s voice tore me from my daydreams:
“What a shame, a shame that you did not go with your mother…I saw many children your age go with their mothers…”
His voice was terribly sad. I understood that he did not wish to see what they would do to me. He did not wish to see his only son go up in flames.
My forehead was covered with cold sweat. Still, I told him that I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes…
“The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria…” His voice broke.
“Father,” I said. “If that is true, then I don’t want to wait. I’ll run into the electrified barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames.”
He didn’t answer. He was weeping. His body was shaking. Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don’t know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves. (50-51)
Passage #4:
I listened as the inmate’s voice rose; it was powerful yet broken, amid the weeping, the sobbing, the sighing of the entire “congregation”:
“All the earth and universe are God’s!”
He kept pausing, as though he lacked the strength to uncover the meaning beneath the text. The melody was stifled in his throat.
And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. When You were displeased by Noah’s generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name! (85-86)
Passage #5:
YOM KIPPUR. The Day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises.
I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.
And I nibbled on my crust of bread.
Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening. (87)
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