NightELIE WIESEL
1960

INTRODUCTION

As a young journalist in France in 1954, Elie Wiesel was assigned to interview novelist François Mauriac, the noted Nobel Laureate. Their conversation turned to the events of the German Occupation; Mauriac told the young reporter of his wife's witnessing the train-car loads of Jewish children waiting for deportation at the station in Austerlitz. Mauriac writes in the "Forward" for Night: "And when I said, with a sigh, 'How often I've thought about those children!' [Wiesel] replied, 'I was one of them."' Mauriac convinced Wiesel to write of his experiences in the Holocaust concentration camps, in a time when few survivors were speaking or writing about their experiences.

The original draft of what would eventually become Night was more than eight hundred pages. This work in Holocaust studies is part of a history that tells of the atrocities committed against nearly six million Jews in German concentration camps during World War II. The imagery Wiesel uses provides the reader with an experience of the unimaginable. Wiesel's work centers around the themes of loss—innocence, faith, family—death, and dehumanization. The very idea of night and its association with darkness, isolation, fear, and pain, serves to further underscore those themes.

Wiesel's novel represents a different perspective of the Jewish Holocaust than the popular and well-known story told in The Diary of Anne Frank. While readers learn of the Frank family and their continuous struggle to remain hidden from Nazi deportation and death, Wiesel's memoir reveals the horror of life and the reality of death behind the iron gates and barbed wire of several concentration camps. For many years after the war, Holocaust survivors were reluctant to relive their experiences through interviews or in literature. Therefore, many admire Wiesel's courage in being one of the first survivors to expose his nightmarish experiences. However, the literary style in which Night is told vaults Wiesel's work from documentary to literature. As Bantam Books, the English-language publisher of Night, notes, Night is a "shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again."

BIOGRAPHY
Elie Wiesel

Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania, a center of Jewish culture in the Transylvania region. Growing up, his parents encouraged Wiesel's intense study of Jewish theology. In the spring of 1944, when Wiesel was almost fifteen years old, his life changed forever when Nazi forces moved into Sighet and soon deported all Jews, including the Wiesel family. As the front lines of World War II moved through Germany, Wiesel and his father were moved from one concentration camp to another. Their last stop was Buchenwald, where Wiesel's father, Chlomo, died of dysentery and starvation. After a year in the Nazi death camps, Wiesel was liberated in April 1945; only then did he learn of the death of his mother and little sister, Tzipora, who were killed in the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz. His older sisters, however, survived and later reunited with Wiesel.

Wiesel's writing career began with the study of literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. He later worked as a journalist in the French capital. Convinced by François Mauriac to write of his experiences in the concentration camps, Wiesel produced an original text of over eight hundred pages called And the World Remained Silent, which was originally published in Yiddish. Eventually this work was abridged and became the memoir Night, published originally in French. Two of Wiesel's other novels, Dawn and The Accident (sometimes grouped as a trilogy with Night), deal with the struggles of Holocaust survival. Most of Wiesel's texts are set immediately before or after the Holocaust. He won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and, as of 2005, he is the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University.

In Night, the reader experiences the atrocities as the author remembers his fifteen-year-old self experiencing them. The events occur in loose chronological order: his hometown's evolution from cultural center into a police ghetto, to the cattle-car deportation of all Jews in the area, to the first-person testaments of genocidal loss, through the liberation of the camps, and Wiesel's realization that the corpse-like reflection in the mirror is, indeed, himself. The narrative structure, scarred by the tragic events of the Holocaust, is at times fragmented and chaotic, a technique that illustrates the trauma of Holocaust survival.

PLOT SUMMARY

Chapter 1

In the opening lines of Night, the reader meets Moshe the Beadle. A beadle is a minor official in a synagogue in charge of ushers and general order during religious services. The relationship between Wiesel and Moshe serves to emphasize the intense and serious nature of the younger man's faith. With Moshe as his mentor, Wiesel fills his days with prayer, studying the Talmud (ancient writings that constitute the religious authority of Orthodox Judaism), and going to the synagogue in his small hometown of Sighet in Transylvania, a region in northern Romania that was under Austro-Hungarian rule.

As World War II rages throughout Europe, the Jews of Sighet hear rumors of arrests, ghettos, and forced deportations, but ignore them. Soon the rumors prove true as Hungarian police arrive and deport all foreign Jews, including Moshe. Several months pass and Moshe returns to Sighet with horror stories of mass executions and German soldiers using Jewish babies for target practice. No one listens; Moshe is disregarded and considered crazy. In a matter of months, however, German soldiers arrive in Sighet and divide the town into two ghettos, large and small, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolling gunmen. The decision is made that the Jews of Sighet will be deported by train, eighty Jews per cattle-car.

Chapter 2

The cattle-cars are crowded with standing bodies—humans suffering terrible heat, hunger, pain, and tension. Madame Schächter, the town prophet, continually screams about the flames she sees, though only the black of night appears through the small windows. Her incessant cries are soon met with shouts from the hungry and terrified prisoners. Their journey ends at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz. The prisoners are greeted by men in striped clothing, towering flames, and the smell of burning flesh.

Chapter 3

The first of the notorious Nazi "selections" begin. Prisoners form two lines and as each passes by a German official, they are told to proceed to the left or the right—one direction means temporary safety, and the other, certain death. Wiesel, separated with his father from the rest of the family, sees his mother and sister for the last time. A man now infamous for his cruel and inhumane medical experiments performed on Jews, Dr. Joseph Mengele, appears at the end of Wiesel's and his father's line, but passes them over after a brief interrogation. Wiesel's group is forced to march within feet of ditches engulfed in flames before turning toward a barracks. The men are stripped of their clothing and personal belongings, showered, shaved of all body hair, and given prisoner clothing. They march from Birkenau to Auschwitz and Wiesel loses his name, becoming instead A-7713; the chapter concludes with a four-hour march to the Buna concentration camp.

Chapter 4

After another selection, the guards choose Wiesel and his father to work in a warehouse sorting nuts and bolts. Wiesel, now more experienced in the ways of the camp, tries to bargain to keep his gold-crowned tooth. He is successful with the first dentist, but eventually loses his tooth and gets nothing in return. While working in the warehouse, Wiesel follows a noise to a side room where he discovers one of the guards with a young Polish girl. For his discovery, Wiesel is beaten in front of the other prisoners until he faints. One week later, at roll call, the prisoners are made to witness a young prisoner's execution, which the guards explain is a "warning and an example to all prisoners." The memory of this execution triggers another for Wiesel: he remembers the Nazis performing an earlier routine roll call and then erecting three gallows (hangman's nooses hung from a high bar). Three Jews march forward, two men and an eight-year-old boy. As the chairs are kicked from beneath the victims, their bodies hang, writhing for a last breath. As they were forced to do before, the rest of the prisoners walk past the bodies to look at the murdered men. When they do this, they discover that the eight-year-old, whose body is too light for the rope to break his neck or completely choke him, is still alive; he does not die for several hours. Watching this event, many prisoners express aloud what Wiesel silently contemplates, "Where is God now?"

Chapter 5

Another selection is performed by Dr. Mengele and both Wiesel and his father again manage to escape execution. The constant battle for life over death is emphasized by Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. While struggling to stay alive and avoid the punishing blows of the guards, Wiesel, who once possessed a deep emotional and spiritual connection to the Jewish faith, begins to resent the God who would allow these atrocities to happen. He refers to Rosh Hashanah as "the last day of that accursed year." Days and weeks pass, as the prisoners live in continual fear of the dreadful selections. On the morning of one selection, Wiesel's father, certain that he is too ill and will be selected, gives a reluctant Wiesel his knife and spoon. Wiesel spends the day in dread of what he will find when he returns to the barrack. When he returns, however, he finds that his father has been able to prove his usefulness to the guards, and has secured another day alive with his son.

Wiesel mentions that Akiba Drumer, a prisoner who had lost the will to live, has been selected. The memory of Drumer triggers the narrator's memory of a faithful old rabbi who once prayed constantly and recited scripture and passages of the Talmud by heart. Like Wiesel, the old rabbi lost his faith and began to believe that God betrayed the Jews; he tells Wiesel that God is no longer with them.

Wiesel develops pain in his foot and is taken to the hospital for an operation. While he recovers, the front lines of the war move closer to the camp and the Germans begin evacuating before the Allied Forces (among which are the United States, England, and Russia) arrive at Buna. Despite the pain in his foot, Wiesel leaves the emptying hospital to find his father. The SS (the Nazi paramilitary group called the Schutzstaffel), amid approaching gunfire and explosions, gather their prisoners and begin a massive march away from Buna in the harsh winter snow and icy wind.

Chapter 6

The forced march turns into a run of forty-two miles. In spite of the throbbing pain in his foot, Wiesel continues to run, sometimes closing his eyes to rest while running. When he wants to stop, he thinks of his father, who though frail, keeps pace with the rest—Wiesel knows that he cannot let himself die because his father needs him. The bond between father and son takes on even greater significance in this section. Although Wiesel and his father demonstrate devotion to one another, particularly during the brief rest stops and their eventual arrival at Gleiwitz, not all prisoners do the same. Another prisoner's son abandons his father during the fast-paced mass exodus. The SS officers shot any man who slowed down or showed the slightest sign of fatigue. In order to save himself, one young man leaves his elderly father in the swelling crowd of running men.

When they arrive at Gleiwitz, the prisoners are crowded into barracks so tightly that many crush one another or suffocate. Wiesel recognizes the voice of one of the crushed men as his friend and fellow prisoner, Juliek, a violinist. Later, he hears a fragment from Beethoven's concerto. Juliek is playing "a farewell on his violin to an audience of dying men." In the morning, Wiesel finds Juliek dead; his violin has been crushed.

After three days in the crowded barracks at Gleiwitz, the prisoners are marched into an empty field of falling snow to wait for a train. When it arrives, guards push the men into cattle-cars with no roofs. This time, there are one hundred men per railcar.

Chapter 7

The train stops occasionally in small German towns where the citizens make sport in throwing crusts of bread into the train to watch the fights that explode as the hungry prisoners struggle for any small amount of food. Wiesel and his own father, now near death from starvation and exposure to the cold, watch as an elderly father crawls to a scrap of bread, only to have his own son fall on him and wrestle the bread out of his grip. Once he has it, the son is then beaten by a group of starving men for the same small portion of bread. After the struggle, Wiesel remembers, "When they withdrew, next to me were two corpses, side by side, the father and the son. I was fifteen years old."

Their journey on the train continues, amid the desperate wails of prisoners. On the day before they arrive at their destination, the entire train convulses as "[h]undreds of cries rose up simultaneously…. The death rattle of a whole convoy who felt the end upon them." Of the one hundred men who began the journey, only twelve emerge from the cattle-car. Wiesel and his father had arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Chapter 8

The poor organization of this camp shows signs that the Germans are losing the war. Wiesel's father falls very ill with dysentery and begins to deteriorate physically and mentally. During an air raid alert, the father and son are separated from one another as Wiesel takes cover in a barracks. He goes back to look for his father, though he is ashamed because he partly considers his father a burden and wishes that he will not find him. Wiesel does find him, but is still somewhat reluctant to care for him because it means giving up some of his own dear food; he chastises himself, saying that he is no better than the sons who left their fathers for dead.

Now that his father is confined to his bunk with the other invalids, Wiesel sleeps there to be closer to him. Chlomo Wiesel's constant groans for water (which a patient with dysentery cannot have) and complaints of hunger make the other invalids furious. While Wiesel is away at roll call, the other men hit his father to make him be quiet. The head of his block tells Wiesel that nothing more can be done for his father; he cautions Wiesel to remember that he is in a concentration camp, where "every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father." During the night of January 28, 1945, Chlomo Wiesel dies. The guards take him away while Wiesel sleeps, and he awakens to find another invalid in his father's place. Wiesel cannot mourn because he "had no more tears."

Chapter 9

After his father's death, Wiesel spends another two months at Buchenwald. Of this time, he writes: "I have nothing to say of my life during this period. It no longer mattered. After my father's death nothing could touch me any more." He thinks solely and continually of finding something to eat.

On April 5, a roll call takes place during which the head of the camp announces that Buchenwald will be "liquidated" in intervals of ten blocks a day. Each day, thousands of prisoners leave through the camp gates and never return. A few days later, the guards decide to evacuate the remaining twenty thousand prisoners, including Wiesel, so that they can blow up the camp. Sirens sound, indicating an alert that prevents them from carrying out their evacuation; on the next day, the SS attempts another evacuation, but the camp resistance movement rises up and drives the SS away from the camp for good. Later that evening, the first American soldiers appear at the gates. The starving prisoners throw themselves on the food; Wiesel contracts a bad case of food poisoning and spends two weeks in the hospital. When he recovers, he looks at himself in a mirror for the first time since he left the ghetto in Sighet. He is forever scarred by the corpse-like image staring back at him.

THEMES

Loss

Wiesel experiences multiple losses throughout the novel: loss of family, loss of faith, and loss of self. After the loss of his home and removal from his synagogue through the railcar deportation, Wiesel is immediately separated from his mother and younger sister, Tzipora, by the Nazis at the first of the concentration camp stops, Birkenau. He did not realize he would never see them again: "I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever."

Wiesel's continual struggle with his loss of faith in God as he faces genocide receives much attention from literary critics. The opening pages recount Wiesel's intense faith and dedication to Jewish theological study; however, as he witnesses children being burned in the flaming ditches of Birkenau, his faith decays. A final confirmation of this loss comes from an old rabbi Wiesel continually sees praying and reciting long passages from the Talmud. The fifteen-year-old reaches a critical moment when the rabbi tells him, "It's the end. God is no longer with us." In the face of escalating torture, starvation, and death, the rabbi continues: "Where is the divine Mercy? Where is God? How can I believe, how could anyone believe, in this merciful God?" As the rabbi has lost his faith, so too have the total losses that Wiesel has sustained stripped him of his humanity and spirituality.

Wiesel's loss of self begins when the chaos and his fear of the environment cause him to lie about his age and occupation. An older Jew advises Wiesel to tell the Germans that he is eighteen—not almost fifteen—and to tell Dr. Mengele that he is a farmer, not a student. As the prisoners enter their barracks, the removal of all identifying, personal belongings (such as hair, clothes, and jewelry) emphasizes Wiesel's loss of self. His identity becomes an anonymous number—A-7713—as he loses his individual name. He highlights this loss by describing the inner deterioration of the young Wiesel: "Within a few seconds, we had ceased to be men…. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it." Later, with the death of his father, the last remaining threads of what was the young Wiesel break: "After my father's death, nothing could touch me anymore." The final words of the novel illustrate the complete loss of self for Wiesel and how unrecognizable he has become to himself: "I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me."

The Bond between Father and Son

Because of his early separation from his mother and sister in the concentration camp, Wiesel forms a strong bond with his father. From the time of his arrival at Birkenau, Wiesel has a single focus: "I had one thought—not to lose [my father]. Not to be left alone." Through the many selections by Dr. Mengele and the SS, to the multiple transitions to different concentration camps, the relationship between Chlomo and Wiesel remains a close, traditional father/son bond. This is in contrast, however, to the many examples of sons betraying fathers as a result of the hellish extremes of their existence. As the conditions grow more extreme for the Wiesels, an unusual reversal develops between father and son, causing Wiesel to take on a father-like role and care for his now weakened, ill, and child-like father. When first arriving at Birkenau, Wiesel notes the father/son bond in an understated, "My father held onto my hand"; however, as Chlomo begins to lose his fight against death and rely heavily on Wiesel for survival, the author writes: "I held onto my father's hand—the old, familiar fear: not to lose him." Wiesel's subtle, yet direct style expresses this important thematic shift in the book.

Man's Inhumanity Towards Man

Wiesel uses the literary technique of juxtaposition, or placing opposites together to form a significant meaning, to illustrate the excessive horrors of genocide: hatred, humiliation, and dehumanization. The first example of this literary technique appears in the juxtaposition of the love between Wiesel and his father and the other son's betrayals of their fathers in the camp. This comparison emphasizes the bond shared by the Wiesels as the harsh, dehumanizing treatment by the SS officers forces sons to turn against their own fathers.

Once in Birkenau, Wiesel juxtaposes the environments: spring, with its traditions of new life and warming sunshine, set against the continual and constant images of death. After seeing a truckload of babies being burned, Wiesel cannot believe that this type of atrocity is actually occurring, to which his father answers, "Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us." A couple pages later, the images of spring emphasize the depths of Nazi cruelty by comparing the previous images of death and destruction with those of life and renewal: "It was a beautiful April day. The fragrance of spring was in the air. The sun was setting in the west."

A traditional theme in literature is the maturation of a young man; however, this theme is juxtaposed with the brutal environment of the death camps. At fifteen years old, Wiesel witnesses more than anyone should encounter in a lifetime. After his father's death, he returns to the barracks—but not to a place with the adults. Instead he returns to the children's area, where he waits for two months before being liberated. This reversal of the traditional maturation theme highlights the extreme conditions brought about by Nazi brutality.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Post-World War I Germany

While the genocide of six million Jews in Europe during World War II is now a widely known fact, to understand how and why these atrocities occurred, it is important to place the events in context. Following World War I, Europe, and in particular Germany, suffered from an economic depression. Having been obliged by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) to accept all responsibility for causing the First World War and forced to pay huge war reparations, or reimbursements, Germans suffered from low morale and a devastated economy. The country was in political and social chaos, which caused the rise of various extremist groups.

Rise of the Nazi Party

Adolph Hitler was a former World War I soldier and house painter turned politician. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, in his endeavors to promote his ideology, Hitler was arrested for his attempted overthrow of the Munich authorities. While in prison, he wrote Mein Kampf, a book that detailed his political philosophy: radical German nationalism (the political idea that each nation should have its own state); anti-Semitism (views or actions that discriminate against Jewish people); and anti-Marxism (Marxism is a political philosophy that embraces socialism in hopes of a classless society). After a short prison sentence, Hitler rebuilt the Nazi party, which he had begun prior to his incarceration. He eventually gained support for his ideas by promoting a program of extensive anti-Semitic propaganda; he encouraged non-Jewish Germans to blame Germany's economic and social problems on the Jewish people. The people of Germany were vulnerable to Hitler's promises of better economic times. Hitler's war machine created new jobs, resurrected national pride, and turned people's attention to the cause, according to Hitler, of the recent past's hard economic times: the Jew.

When he became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler began to formulate plans for his "solution": to rid Germany of all people who did not fit his ideals. He enacted the Nuremburg Laws of 1935, which stripped German Jews of their civil rights as citizens. Few escaped scrutiny during the 1930s and early 1940s in Germany. Anyone who was different from Hitler's prescribed ideal was subject to arrest, deportation, or death. Hitler killed as many non-Jews as he did Jews: the first people to be deported to concentration camps were those who publicly disagreed with his views, along with the disabled or sick that could not help further his cause, and those whom he considered degenerate, like Gypsies and homosexuals. Jews were targeted not only because of Europe's long history of anti-Semitism, but also because many Jewish citizens possessed wealth and owned land.

Hitler's "Final Solution" and Nazi Military Conquest

The Nuremburg Laws were a preliminary step in the annihilation of the Jewish people. The next step that the Nazis took was crowding Jews into ghettos, a method used in Europe for centuries to isolate Jewish people from the rest of society. Finally, the Jews were moved from the ghettos to concentration camps to enact Hitler's "Final Solution," the systematic mass murder of all Jews.

Part of Hitler's program for German dominance included his quest to create more lebensraum (the German word for living space) for the Germans who did fit his ideals. He did this by invading countries with large German-speaking populations, and next, the whole of Europe. The German army eventually took control of Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania, the Baltic states, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, establishing ghettos in all of these countries, and then deporting Jews to the concentration camps.

Ghetto life was crowded and wretched, and could hardly even be considered "life." While in the Buna concentration camp, Wiesel's hospital neighbor gave him this advice concerning Hitler's vow to exterminate all the Jews in Germany: "I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." For a fortunate few, the end of World War II came before Hitler could keep his word to all the Jews of Europe.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Since the first publication of Night, critics and general readers alike have praised Wiesel not only for his courage to write about his experiences in the concentration camps, but also for his ability as a writer. More than a mere chronicler of events, Wiesel creates literature from the traumatic experiences of his childhood. In the book Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust, Lea Wernick Fridman closely analyzes Night for how Wiesel bears witness and uses language to express the inexpressible. Fridman writes, "The opening up in Wiesel's Night occurs in the intertwining of two stories, the first a story about words, and the second a story about experience." Agreeing with Fridman's assessment of Wiesel's use of language, Ellen S. Fine notes the major images of fire and night and the predominant themes in Wiesel's novel in her book Legacy of "Night": The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel. Fine explains that when Wiesel and his family are placed in the cattle-cars on their way to the concentration camp, "The theme of night corresponds here to the reduction of space." Whereas the darkness in the temple used to allow for spiritual exploration, the blackness inside the cattle-cars "plunge[s] the prisoners into the confinement and extreme darkness of a night without limits."

Not all reviewers, however, positively critique Wiesel's work. A. Alvarez, in the article "Literature of the Holocaust," argues that, "[a]s a human document, Night is almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism. But … it is a failure as a work of art." Subsequent to this article in 1968, Alvarez became one of the most contested critics of Wiesel's work. Irving Halperin defends the work of Elie Wiesel against critics like Alvarez by stating that to require writers of the Holocaust to write dispassionately, as he argues Alvarez does, is to apply the wrong criteria to analyzing this type of literature. Halperin argues that Wiesel's literature is important because "his books excite us to intense reflection. Clearly, they have suggested some of the most crucial, if unanswerable, questions pertinent to the Holocaust." Critics such as Halperin demonstrate the reasons why, fifty years after the first publication, Night remains a premier literary testimonial text of the Holocaust.

CRITICISM

Daniel R. Schwartz

In the following excerpt, Martin points out the questions of the civilization's moral responsibility for war and violence raised by Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans.

Night is a narrative that traces the dissolution of the Jewish community in Sighet, the ghettoes, deportations, concentration camps, crematoriums, death marches, and, finally, liberation. Distilling memoir into narrative form, Night traces the growth of adolescent courage and the loss of religious faith. Wiesel's original Yiddish title for Night was Un di velt hot geshvign, or in English, And the World Remained Silent. He distilled 882 pages to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition and Jerome Lindon, the French publisher, further edited it to 178 pages. I am interested not in the indictment of Wiesel for transforming his nominalistic memoir into novelistic form, but in how, in response to publishing circumstances and perhaps his own transformation, he reconfigured an existential novel about the descent into moral night into a somewhat affirmative reemergence to life. While the narrator is a fifteen year old boy, Wiesel was born in 1928 and would have been sixteen for most of the 1944–5 period. Is not this age discrepancy one reason why we ought think of Night as a novel as well as a memoir?

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

First Person Singular: Elie Wiesel is a one-hour PBS interview with Wiesel, and includes readings from his work and a very brief glimpse into Wiesel's life. Lives and Legacies Film, Inc., 2002. It is available on DVD or VHS from PBS Home Video.

Elie Wiesel Goes Home is a video documentary that follows Elie Wiesel as he returns to the Auschwitz concentration camp and recalls the events that made his novel Night so powerfully unforgettable. Choices, Inc., 1994. It is available on DVD or VHS from Choices, Inc.

The text traces the death of the narrator's mother, a sister, and finally, his father; it witness an encroaching horrible moral NIGHT, a night that includes the speaker's loss of religious belief in the face of historical events. Notwithstanding his religious upbringing, Wiesel parts company from those who, as Dawidowicz explains, accept the Holocaust as God's will:

For believing Jews the conviction that their sacrifice was required as a testimony to Almighty God was more comforting than the supposition that He had abandoned them altogether. To be sure, God's design was concealed from them, but they would remain steadfast in their faith. Morale was sustained by rabbis and pious Jews who, by their own resolute and exalted stance, provided a model of how Jews should encounter death.

We should think of the text as a physical object and note its slimness, its titleless chapters, its breaks between anecdotes. We wonder what could be added in those white spaces, whether his loss of faith, for example, is gradual? But the slim volume, the white spaces, become a kind of correlative or metonomy to emptiness, to his "starved stomach." The short paragraphs give a kind of cinematic effect as if the paragraphs are like frames in an evolving film. The very simplicity—the almost childlike quality—of the imagery gives the work its parabolic quality.

Wiesel draws upon a tradition of prophetic hyperbole: "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 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." The camps dissolve traditional morality and replace it with extreme conditions that make the struggle to survive the only value. Thus the death of his father "frees" him to save himself; he is at once "free at last" and emotionally anaesthetized: "nothing could touch me any more."

Whether a novel or memoir, Night depends upon and affirms the concept of individual agency, for the speaker tells a wondrous and horrible tale of saving his life and shaping his role as Witness, perhaps our Daniel. As Terence Des Pres writes:

Silence is the only adequate response, but the pressure of the scream persists. This is the obsessive center of Wiesel's writing: his protagonists desire a silence they cannot keep. […] The conflict between silence and the scream, so prominent in Wiesel's novels, is in fact a battle between death and life, between allegiance to the dead and care for the living, which rages in the survivor and resolves itself in the act of bearing witness. […] Silence, in its primal aspect, is a consequence of terror, of a dissolution of self and world that, once known, can never he fully dispelled. But in retrospect it becomes something else. Silence constitutes the realm of the dead. It is the palpable substance of those millions murdered, the world no longer present, that intimate absence—of God, of man, of love—by which the survivor is haunted, in the survivor's voice the dead's own scream is active.

In Night we see dramatized the process of the narrator's developing into his role of ethical witness in the face of historical forces that would obliterate his humanity, his individuality, and his voice. For those, like Wiesel, who have experienced the Holocaust first hand—for whom Auschwitz is not a metaphor but a memory—language is more than the free play of signifiers. For these people and others on the political edge, their very telling—their very living—testifies to will, agency, and a desire to survive that resists and renders morally irrelevant simple positivistic explanations arguing that an author's language is culturally produced. One might ask why Wiesel writes. For one thing, it is to bear witness; for another, it is an act of self-therapy; for a third, it is a kind of transference; and as the dedication stresses ("In memory of my parents and my little sister, Tsipora,") it is an act of homage. Furthermore, in psychoanalytic linguistic terms, the narrator's telling is a resistance to the way in which the word "Jew" was culturally produced to mean inferior people who were progressively discounted, deprived of basic rights as citizens, labeled with a Yellow Star of David, imprisoned, enslaved, and killed. We might recall how all male German Jews were required to take the middle name "Israel," all females the name "Sarah."

According to Wiesel, "the Holocaust in its enormity defies language and art, and yet both must be used to tell the tale, the tale that must be told." The very opening, "They called him Moshe the Beadle," is a storyteller's invitation to step into another world. As with any life writing, the selection and arrangement into narrative blur the line between fiction and fact, and the inclusion of dialogue, recalled at an immense distance of years, contributes to the novelistic aspect of his memoir.

Wiesel explains in his essay "An Interview Unlike Any Other" why he waited ten years to write his memoir:

I knew the role of the survivor was to testify. Only I did not know how. I lacked experience, I lacked a framework. I mistrusted the tools, the procedures. Should one say it all or hold it all back? Should one shout or whisper? Place the emphasis on those who were gone or on their heirs? How does one describe the indescribable? How does one use restraint in re-creating the fall of mankind and the eclipse of the gods? And then, how can one be sure that the words, once uttered, will not betray, distort the message they bear?

Wiesel's text is written in the biblical style in which highlighted moments full of significance are presented without the careful concatenation of events we find in the realistic novel. The biblical style owes itself to his being steeped not only in the Old Testament—a text that pays little attention to background or setting, and eschews gradual introductions of its heightened and sublime moments—but also to a Talmudic tradition by which parabolic anecdotes are used to illustrate important themes. Rather than gradual change when he loses faith, a change developing from the Nazi arrival, he experiences loss of faith as an epiphanic moment. Unlike the realistic novel or memoir, we cannot relate his role of passionate witness to a grammar of specific causes such as his father's tears:

For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?

Although the basic unit of form is the retrospective memory of the teller who wrote after a ten year hiatus, the book is also organized around a number of motifs. The most important is the loss of faith in the face of evidence that God can do or will do nothing to prevent the Holocaust. Young Wiesel has a transvaluation of faith to disbelief and unbelief. He loses all illusions about a purposeful world.

As if the narrator were struggling to stay alive, as if he were having trouble breathing, the unnumbered and untitled chapters get shorter; the last three of nine chapters take up only seventeen pages. That he moves, on occasion, to a postwar retrospective gives the reader the sense, as in Conrad's Marlow's telling in Heart of Darkness that his memory is struggling with the narrative and that at times he needs to avoid the horrors. Wiesel's breaks between anecdotes has the same effect, as if a pithy anecdote was all the narrator could stand to tell before being overcome. The recurring term "empty" reminds us of how, except for the will to live, his life had become a negation—that is, an absence of love, comfort, health, food. But in the retelling it reminds us of how he has become spiritually anaesthetized and how he has left behind everything he had on the written page.

As in other Holocaust texts, hunger is a dominant theme in Auschwitz. The narrator recalls he soon

took little interest in anything except my daily plate of soup and my crust of stale bread. Bread, soup—these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

Another motif is the father-son tie, one that is so essential in Jewish life. Within the horrors of the Holocaust, these bonds threaten to dissolve. In an awful scene after the evacuation of Auschwitz, when he and his father are being transported to Buchenwald, a son fights his father for bread:

"Meir. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father […] you're hurting me […] you're killing your father! I've get some bread […] for you too […] for you too. […]"

He collapsed. His fist was still clenched around a small piece. He tried to carry it to his mouth. But the other one threw himself upon him and snatched it. The old man again whispered something, let out a rattle, and died amid the general indifference. His son searched him, took the bread, and began to devour it. He was not able to get very far. Two men had seen and hurled themselves upon him. Others joined in. When they withdrew, next to me were two corpses, side by side, the father and the son.

I was fifteen years old.

Transformation is as much a theme here as it is in Kafka. By showing us how life was in Sighet at the outset, we can see the terrible transformation in young Wiesel and his father. When he writes of the masquerade of clothes before the death march, we think of the clown motif in Picasso and the grotesque carnival in James Ensor:

Prisoners appeared in strange outfits: it was like a masquerade. Everyone had put on several garments, one on top of the other, in order to keep out the cold. Poor mountebanks, wider than they were tall, more dead than alive; poor clowns, their ghostlike faces emerging from piles of prison clothes! Buffoons!

By confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and insisting on bearing witness (and resisting Mauriac's Christian gloss), Wiesel's text is an antidote to the way that Anne Frank's story had been manipulated to "glorify," as Bruno Bettelheim puts it, "the ability to retreat into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world, and there to cling as much as possible to what have been one's usual attitudes and activities, although surrounded by a maelstrom apt to engulf one at any moment." In the play and film, we hear Anne's voice from beyond saying, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart," but Bettelheim argues passionately that this statement is not supported or justified Anne's diary:

This improbable sentiment is supposedly from a girl who had been starved to death, had watched her sister meet the same fate before she did, knew that her mother had been murdered, and had watched untold thousands of adults and children being killed. This statement is not justified by anything Anne actually told her diary.

Whether we agree with Bettelheim and whether we chide him for letting his rage distort and appropriate Anne Frank's text as Mauriac and Seidman have appropriated Wiesel, his words give us some sense of how difficult it is for us readers of Holocaust texts to respond ethically to such a searing and heart-rendering narrative of memory, trauma, and literary imagination as Night.

Source: Daniel R. Schwartz, "The Ethics of Reading Elie Wiesel's Night," in Style, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 1998, p. 221.

SOURCES

Alvarez, A, "The Literature of the Holocaust," in Beyond All this Fiddle, edited by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1968, pp. 22-24.

Fine, Ellen S., Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel, State University of New York Press, 1982, p. 14.

Fridman, Lea Wernick, Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust, State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 94.

Halperin, Irving, "From Night to The Gates of the Forest: The Novels of Elie Wiesel," in Messengers from the Dead, Westminster Press, 1970, pp. 45, 49.

Kanfer, Stefan, "Author, Teacher, Witness: Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel Speaks for the Silent," in Time, March 18, 1985, p. 48.

Mauriac, François, "Forward" to Night by Elie Wiesel, Bantam Books, 1960, p. viii.

Wiesel, Elie, Night, translated by Stella Rodway, Bantam Books, 1960.