NIGHT (La Nuit)

Memoir by Elie Wiesel, 1958

Elie Wiesel's Night (1958, La Nuit ) was one of the earliest and most renowned of the Holocaust memoirs. It is characterized by a dramatic style and swiftness of action that has made it a popular book in high school as well as in college literature and history courses. Three themes dominate the book: a respect for the sanctity of life for everyone, including the impoverished and the mentally ill; a lament over the defensive amnesia of many Jews which led them to not believe the existence of Hitler's Final Solution until they themselves were deported to the concentration camps; and a Kaddish (Jewish prayer of memorial) for Wiesel's father, Chlomo Wiesel, who perished in the Holocaust.

In his childhood reminiscences in the first part of Night, Wiesel remembers Moché the Beadle very fondly. Although he was abjectly poor and mentally ill, Moché was a man of great piety and substantial intellectual reserve. His erudition was apparent as he tutored Wiesel in the ways of Jewish mysticism, the cabala and the Zohar.

Foreign Jews were expelled from Wiesel's hometown of Sighet, Hungary, and Moché the Beadle was among them. Sometime later when Moché the Beadle returned to Sighet with news of having survived a mass execution of Jews, the Jews of Sighet reacted with a kind of defensive amnesia: they did not wish to hear the stories they were hearing. Because they knew of Moché's bouts with mental illness, they refused to ascribe any credibility to him despite the fact that he had heroically risked his life to return to Sighet and warn his fellow Jews to escape from the Nazis before it was too late.

While being transported to Auschwitz on cattle cars, Wiesel notices that one of his neighbors, Madame Schächter, has gone mad. She keeps screaming about fires, possibly because she has had a paranormal vision of the fires in the crematorium of Auschwitz. She is mistreated by the other deportees who tie a gag in her mouth. When they arrived at Auschwitz, Wiesel recollects: "I threw a last glance toward Madame Schächter. Her little boy was holding her hand. In front of us flames. In the air that smell of burning flesh." This respect for the intellectual and prophetic sagacity of the mentally ill also finds reflection in Wiesel's later writings and is an important cornerstone of his belief in the sanctity of human life. In this connection, it is important to mention that prior to the Final Solution, the Nazis had implemented several programs to euthanize the mentally ill.

The sanctity of life theme is also seen in Wiesel's relationship with his father. While Elie is taking care of his father shortly before Chlomo's death in Buchenwald, a camp doctor gives Elie a grim lesson in the situational ethics of the concentration camp: "Listen to me, boy. Don't forget you're in a concentration camp. Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father. Here, there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone. I'll give you a sound piece of advice—don't give your ration of bread and soup to your old father. There's nothing you can do for him. And you're killing yourself. Instead, you ought to be having his ration." The doctor's admonition to a 15-year-old boy who deeply loved his father is testimony to the barbaric and animalistic tendencies that prevailed in the Nazi death camps.

Wiesel recalls his first reaction on learning of the death of his father:

I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father's place was another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn and taken him to the crematory. He may still have been breathing. There were no prayers at his grave. No candles were lit to his memory. His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond. I did not weep, and it pained me to feel that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like—free at last.

Nonetheless, his father's careful thinking had often kept Wiesel alive in Auschwitz and during a death march en route to Buchenwald. Night is therefore a more permanent Kaddish, a more permanent memorial, to Chlomo Wiesel than any grave-side ceremony would have been.

—Peter R. Erspamer