Night by Elie Wiesel 3
Night by Elie WieselElie Wiesel’s Night was first published in an English translation in 1960;
it is a slightly fictionalized account of Wiesel’s experiences as a
concentration
camp survivor. His first attempt to write about his experiences was written
in Yiddish and contained some eight hundred pages; the English translation
of the French version of those experiences, Night, is less than a hundred
and fifty pages. It is episodic in structure, with only a few key scenes
in each chapter serving to illustrate the themes of the work. One of the
most important of these themes is faith, and specifically Eliezer’s struggle
to retain his faith in God, in himself, in humanity, and in words themselves,
in spite of the disbelief, degradation and destruction of the concentration
camp universe.
Night opens in 1943, during a time when Hungary’s Jews were still largely
untouched by the horrors of the Holocaust. It begins with a description
of Moshe the Beadle, who is instructing the pious young Eliezer in the
mysteries of the cabbala, Jewish mysticism. Eliezer’s education is
interruptedwhen Moshe is deported with the other foreign-born Jews of Sighet.
Moshe
returns to Sighet with an almost unbelievable story: all the Jews with
whom he was deported have been massacred. The villagers react with disbelief;
they denounce him as a madman. As Ora Avni writes, this first episode of
Night reminds the reader of the perils of disbelief.
Wiesel, the writer, occupies the same position as Moshe is the story:
he is telling stories that are too horrible to be believed, and yet they
are true. As Lucy Dawidowicz writes, “To comprehend the strange and
unfamiliar,
the human mind proceeds from the reality of experience by applying reason,
logic, and analogy…The Jews, in their earliest encounters with the
anti-Jewish
policies of Hitler’s Germany, saw their situation as a retro version of
their history, but in their ultimate experience with the Final Solution,
historical experience…failed them as explanation.”
The Jews of Sighet cannot believe Moshe’s stories because nothing in their
experience has prepared them for the knowledge that the very fact of their
existence is punishable by death. His warnings go unheeded, even after
the Fascists come to power in Hungary, even after German troops appear
in Sighet, even after two Jewish ghettoes are created, then rapidly
liquidated,
right up until the moment the last group of Jews from Sighet arrives at
Birkenau. It is only as they disembark from the train, aware of the smell
of burning flesh, that they recognize the consequences of their disbelief;
faith in Moshe’s stories might have given them the impetus to flee, to
hide, or to resist before it was too late.
Night has been described as a “negative Bildungsroman,” a coming-of-age
story in which, rather than finding his identity as a young hero would
typically do, Eliezer progressively loses his identity throughout the course
of the narrative....
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