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. This identity-disintegration is experienced individually
and collectively and symbolized in the early parts of the text by the loss
of possessions. After the Jews of Sighet learn that they are to be deported,
they abandon religious objects in the backyard of Eliezer’s family. Later,
while they are waiting to be deported, they are forced to relieve themselves
on the floor of their own holy place, the synagogue.
Judaism, the shared faith in the special Jewish covenant with God which
sustains Eliezer and his community, is one of the things which the villagers
are forced to give up; indeed, their religion is what has marked them to
be condemned. Nothing in Eliezer’s religious studies has prepared him for
the sight of children being burned alive in pits, a sight made all the
more horrific for readers by our knowledge of his own youth and the youth
of his sister Tzipora, from whom he has just been separated forever. Wiesel
writes, in a now-famous passage:
“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
moments 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.”
Eliezer’s faith in himself, in God and in humanity has been consumed,
and the horror of this annihilation is underscored by the way Wiesel
structures
this passage; in its repetition, it is like a prayer. Simon Sibelman writes
that “Wiesel composes a new psalm, one which reflects the negativity of
Auschwitz and the eclipse of God.”
The religious traditions of Judaism, then, are both inadequate to comprehend
the existence of Auschwitz and almost impossible to practice there. The
men in the camp debate whether or not the observances of Rosh Hashanah
and Yom Kippur, required of them by the Jewish covenant with God, are still
required after God has betrayed them by breaking that covenant. Eliezer
describes eating on Yom Kippur, traditionally a day of fasting and atonement
for sins, as an act of defiance against a God in whose mercy he no longer
believes. Yet he feels a great emptiness within him, as his identity, and
thus his humanity, has depended on his membership in the Jewish community,
a community which is being destroyed around him. He writes of meeting his
father on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a day when his disbelief
makes him feel alone in the universe:
“I ran off to look for my father. And at the same time I was afraid of
having to wish him a Happy New Year when I no longer believed it.
He was standing near the wall, bowed down, his shoulders sagging as though
beneath a heavy burden. I went up to him, took his hand and kissed it.
A tear fell upon it. Whose was that tear? Mine? His? I said nothing. Nor
did he. We had never understood each other so clearly.”
In this passage, Eliezer silently shares his grief with his father; the
horrors of Auschwitz have stripped their holiest holidays of all meaning
and the loss is grievous to them both. Yet at other times, Wiesel suggests
that faith is crucial to surviving in the concentration camp. Akiba Drumer,
who had been so devout, makes the conscious decision to die after he loses
his faith. Meir Katz, who had been so strong, is broken by his loss of
faith and dies on the last night of the transport to Buchenwald. Wiesel
has written elsewhere that “it is permissible for man to accuse God, provided
it be done in the name of faith in God.” In other words, Eliezer’s ability
to argue with God, as he learned during his study of the cabbala, is itself
a kind of faith in God, a faith that helps him to survive the camps.
Faith is the cornerstone of a relationship with God; it is also the
cornerstone
of Eliezer’s relationships with others, which in turn give him a sense
of his own identity. It is shared faith in God which binds the Jews of
Sighet together, and it is faith in each other which makes those
relationshipsviable and strong.
The most important relationship in Night, and one which illustrates the
power of faith and of disbelief, is Eliezer’s relationship with his father.
After the two are separated from the rest of their family, Eliezer’s only
thought is not to lose his father. Several times in the story, Eliezer
saves his father’s life, sometimes risking his own, as he does when he
rescues his father from the line of men who have been condemned. As Ted
Estess writes, “Eliezer makes only one thing necessary to him: absolute
fidelity to his father. God has broken His covenant, His promises to His
people; Eliezer, in contrast, determines…not to violate his covenant
with his father.”Yet Eliezer is haunted by a desire to abandon his father,
and is filled with doubts about his own ability to keep the covenant between
them. He is given contradictory advice by two veterans of Auschwitz; one
tells the newly-arrived men that they must band together in order to survive,
while another tells Eliezer that he is better off without worrying about
anyone but himself.
Night contains many scenes where fathers and sons are separated, where
the son turns on the father or abandons him. Rabbi Eliahou’s faith in his
son’s love has kept him alive, and thus Eliezer is thankful that he has
not revealed that Rabbi Eliahou’s son has deliberately abandoned him. He
also prays to ask for the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son
has done. When Eliezer’s father dies, he feels relief, yet Wiesel writes
nothing of Eliezer’s time in Buchenwald after the death of his father,
because Eliezer feels that he himself has died. Wiesel suggests that though
the guards pit loved ones against each other, wanting to impose a system
of “every man for himself,” the men must find the strength to have faith
in each other and in their own ability to resist this almost inexorable
pressure. As Ellen Fine writes, “to care for another shows the persistence
of self in a system principally designed to annihilate the self.”
Eliezer’s silence, which occurs when his father dies, symbolizes his virtual
death. Language is the underpinning of human relationships, and is itself
bound up in notions of faith and disbelief. Martin Buber writes that
“language…represents
communion, communication, and community,” and communication through language
depends on faith in shared experiences and concepts. Wiesel asserts that
the only word that still has meaning at Auschwitz is “furnace,” because
the smell of burning flesh makes it real. The other words, then, have lost
their meanings, symbolized by the sign proclaiming that “Work Means Freedom.”
In fact, at Auschwitz, work means a slower death than that inflicted on
those who were killed immediately. A “doctor” is someone, like Dr. Mengele,
who selects people for death rather than saving them from it. A “son” can
kill, rather than respect, his father. Like prayer, words themselves are
perverted in the concentration camp universe, and Eliezer loses faith in
their ability to achieve communion with God, to communicate with others,
or to bind people together in a community. His last loss of faith is his
loss of faith in words themselves, which causes him to withdraw into silence
and disrupts the narrative itself.
Wiesel’s writings after Night have been attempts to reclaim faith in
language,
in humanity, in God, and in himself. In Night, faith seems an incredible
burden, a hindrance to survival, and yet it remains the only way in which
the Jews can survive the horrors of the Holocaust. In the context of the
concentration camp universe, Wiesel suggests that the only thing more
dangerous
than faith is disbelief.