Night by Elie Wiesel
When reflecting on a literary work that has endured for almost 65 years and left an indelible mark on history, it’s remarkable to consider its profound impact on millions of readers and its recognition with a Nobel prize.
The moment was the Holocaust, and the book–the memoir–is Elie Wiesel’s Night. It is a gut-wrenching snapshot of the horror and human suffering enforced on millions in the German concentration camps. It is the night when Wiesel’s family arrives at Auschwitz, and the night never ends but only darkens as the family is split, never to be reunited. Elie and his slowly withering father struggle each day to survive malnutrition, cruelty, and daily, endless physical labor in and around the camps. A gate to the camp carries the phrase “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work makes you free.” Still, the freedom offered only came through death, through exhaustion, starvation, malnutrition, or a multitude of other slow deaths, including the gas chambers and crematoriums.
Founded in 1940 by Germans in southwest Poland on the outskirts of the town Oświęcim, about 40 miles from Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau wasn’t so much a single camp as a network of camps. The Germans established the camp system to take advantage of the slave labor of arrested Poles. However, within two years, nearly all of the Jews in Poland were in concentration camps, as were other undesirables who became prisoners (including gypsies, communists, and political dissidents).
Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, bringing 15-year-old Elie Wiesel and his family into Hitler’s domain, and this is where Night begins. Along with the rest of his town’s population, they are confined in a ghetto until the time comes that the Nazis decide to deport the 440,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps. They are packed on trains in cattle cars and treated like animals, becoming increasingly hostile as they get further from home. As they cross the border with Czechoslovakia, the soldiers nail the doors shut despite intense heat, scarce food, and only two toilet buckets. Prisoners are forced to take turns standing, and deaths begin to occur. There is terror, pain, intense discomfort, and complete ignorance of their destination.
One of the most arresting images in the book is of Mrs Schachter on the train. Alone with her son, she begins to hallucinate under pressure, and on the third night on the train, she begins to scream about a fire that only she can see outside of the train, terrifying others around her. Though they think she is crazy, others on the train eventually tie her up and gag her to silence her screams while her child looks on. She breaks free, though, screaming about the furnace that only she can see, a foreshadowing of the death that so many of them would face at the end of their journey, though they did not know it yet. This, combined with the response of those around her–they beat her into silence, unnerved by her rantings, their humanity slipping away as they are treated like animals–causes the scene to resonate with echoes of what will come. As the Nazis dehumanize the Jews, the Jews begin to lose their civilization and cohesion and act with cruelty not found in their society before. This is perhaps the saddest moment, and it almost passes unnoticed in the onslaught of terrible moments that will follow in the coming pages.
When Elie arrives at the camp, Elie and his family are split up. Elie’s mother and sister go with the women, and Elie follows his father to the men. It is the last time he will see his mother or sister. After traveling so far without knowing their destination, they now know they are at a concentration camp and soon realize that the ovens, or crematoriums, are burning humans. One prisoner instructs them to lie about their ages–Elie must say he is 18, while his father must be 40, not his actual 50. Another one is angry at them for not rebelling and fighting back. Inspected by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, one of the most reviled characters of this dark chapter of history, Elie and his father are stripped down, but instead of being sent to the crematorium, they are sent to work at Buna.
Conditions are horrific and oppressive, and men are constantly beaten, starved, whipped, and forced to undergo repeated selections to weed out the weak. As Elie endures the humiliations and deprivations, one can sense his humanity slipping and his thoughts constantly turning to food. At the same time, his love for God, once a driving force in his life, is replaced by anger and hatred for God’s seeming abandonment. It is hell on earth, and he cannot see its justice.
Elie hurts his foot, and while in the infirmary for the surgery, the Germans decide to abandon the camp to evade the fast-approaching Russian army. There is a moment when Elie and his father consider not joining them, and later, Elie discovers that the Russians liberated those prisoners who remained behind. But it is too late by then, for he and his father are driven with other prisoners on a death march through the freezing weather. Men who fall behind or stop are beaten, shot, or left for dead.
Arriving at another camp, Elie and his father and over a hundred other men were packed into a cramped cattle car with an open top. The journey was harsh, and by the time they reached Buchenwald, only 12 men from their original group remained. Tragically, shortly after their arrival, Elie’s father passed away. Elie was only made aware of his father’s death when he noticed another man occupying his father’s bunk. He realizes he has an immediate sense of relief because of the burden his father has been, but also guilt at the relief. It is another moment of terrible destruction on his spirit brought about by the Nazi horror.
Following the liberation of the camp in April 1945, Elie undergoes a transformative moment when he catches sight of himself in the mirror and is struck by the profound changes in his appearance. The reflection staring back at him is a stark reminder of the suffering and trauma he has endured. This realization signifies a profound internal shift as Elie grapples with the prospect of rebuilding his life after indescribable horrors. The liberation serves as a poignant milestone, ushering in a new era in which Elie must confront the enduring impact of his harrowing experiences.
On a personal note, I visited Auschwitz in the spring of this year, 2024, nearly 80 years after Elie Weisel lived there, a prisoner solely because of his birth as a Jew, a person determined to be an “undesirable.” He had not committed a crime or hurt a soul, and he was not unique but was one of 1.3M people that Nazis decided should be concentrated in a camp for the greater good of Nazi Germany. Over a million people were murdered there, gassed, burned, or worked to death, and the scar on humanity remains there today, a sad commentary on our ability as humans to denigrate and demean our brothers and sisters to something subhuman, trash, and rubbish to be destroyed. The Auschwitz camps were vast, stretching over a large area of southwest Poland, its organization a tragic tribute to the mundane precision of the Germans. I couldn’t help but wonder how Germans allowed the creation of the camps or how Hungarians and Romanians allowed 440,000 Jews first to be shoved into ghettos and then deported to their deaths. It’s easy to forget that these people were not unaware of the rhetoric that Hitler leveraged to gain power and that hate for Jews was an ever-present part of his narrative.
As I wandered through the camp, an eerie silence surrounded me, broken only perhaps by the call of birds or the low mutter of tourists in my group. Peering into the small cells, I could almost feel the lingering anguish of the prisoners who were once confined and tortured there. The gallows stood as solemn reminders of the lives that were brutally cut short, while the ovens served as harrowing symbols of the atrocities committed against the innocent. Walking past the bunks, I couldn’t help but imagine the haunting echoes of despair that once filled the air. Humans had lived and died here, deprived of the opportunities for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that each human deserves by their existence.
The camp has been transformed into a museum, a poignant memorial honoring the victims and bearing witness to the unspeakable cruelty inflicted upon them. My heart ached as I gazed upon the personal belongings – shoes, luggage, prosthetics, combs – confiscated from the victims, each item bearing poignant stories of lives disrupted and destroyed. It’s tough to fathom how human beings could perpetrate such unfathomable cruelty against their fellow beings for no reason other than their existence.
The museum’s displays stand as a powerful testament to the need for remembrance and the imperative to prevent such inhumanity from occurring again. The artifacts left behind by the victims serve as haunting reminders of the precious lives that were unjustly taken from this world.
My visit to Auschwitz had a profound emotional impact, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of responsibility to seek understanding, offer forgiveness, and spread love to those around me. Although influencing entire nations may be beyond my reach, I firmly believe in the transformative power of individual change and its potential to enhance the lives of others within my sphere of influence.
What can you say about Night? I am still processing it today. It is a book that merits rereading, discussion, and consideration. It cannot be dismissed. It is a memoir of true horrors, a blight on our history that we cannot and should not look away from.
Apparently, I read and reviewed Night eight years ago and completely forgot about it.
Night
Night
Memoir
Hill and Wang
January 16, 2006
Paperback
120 pages
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
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