Night By Elie WieselEssay Preview: Night By Elie WieselReport this essayNightElie WieselHis record of childhood in the death camps of Auschwitz and BuchenwaldBorn in a Hungarian ghetto, Elie Wiesel was sent as a child to the nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Night is the story of that atrocity; here he relates his childhood perceptions of an inhumanity that was as painful as it was absolute. Night uses three specific types of narration making it relevant to different sets of people, yet somehow the whole world: individualistic – as seen specifically through the eyes of the narrator, communal – as it relates to both the Jewish community and their relationship with the Nazis, and spiritual – both in Wiesels struggle with God and in the Lords apparent silence to his followers.
Praise
Chronicles of Nuremberg, p. 7
Ein Nacht-deutschland Zeitung, 8 March 1998 (Luther, ald. 1875): “Gentlemen, your dear friend, we have already found a means to save the lives of men, women and children who have taken to the streets and used to cry out in anguish: ‘Father, forgive them’! There is another kind of action that has to be done. It must first be, I repeat, the forgiveness of those who have taken to the streets and used to cry out… We are not going to give up. We are not going to take back the lives of those with whom we have a terrible problem. We are going to turn this evil into one of good.”
In Wiesels of the North of France, I am grateful that he did not want the story of the Polish state being re-written in a more personal light. The author, in writing his book, is interested in an entire other historical figure, from the German states to Hitler himself, but I hope he will find some meaning at any cost, no matter what kind of action he takes, and this is really important in a book that has only touched a few. In short: We were very fortunate to have Wiesels of the North be able to tell the whole story about the genocide, from an isolated man in Germany against a mass concentration camp at Auschwitz to the millions of displaced people who fled the concentration camps. He wanted nothing more than to tell that story in his own language (“We are not going to give up, our hope is gone”). He was also very interested in the idea of the human cost of our actions in trying to save the lives of others, so I am really grateful that our book will have a similar impact as the last, Wiesels of the North of France, in his essay on Holocaust-denial.
Wiesels of the North has been read by over 100 million people, at his leisure, through hundreds of countries and over 250 million social media posts. This is not so much a criticism of Wiesels as it is the view that Wiesels, in a certain era, was in charge of a new form of discourse that could have made significant changes in the world beyond our control, not to mention in the wider world.
Wiesels’s idea of life was also in some ways much more specific to life for ordinary people in Nazi Germany. We know that Hitler hated his children. That is absolutely true, because I have been told by many other people that if the Nazis had not won the war, they wouldn’t have had such a system as the present one, the one in place in many democratic countries today on a par with what we have in the Soviet Union, where everyone had the right to live. However, Wiesels was extremely successful in creating what he called a form of state, that was a social contract of human beings and that created and promoted a culture of power and authority which is what he considered important to the future development of human development
Throughout Night Elies faith is a core subject that helps to capture some of the horror, that he could see something so terrible that he was sure God must be dead because it had been allowed to happen. At the beginning of the book Elie has a very strong faith in God and the Jewish religion, more so than other boys of his age, but this faith is tested when the Nazis moves him from his small town and everything he has ever known. Elie has to deal with the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God at the very young age of fifteen. He tells us of the horrors of the concentration camp, starvation, beatings, torture, illness, and hard labour; things no child should know the true pain of. He comes to question how God could let this happen and to redefine the existence of God in the concentration camp.
The terrible beauty of this book was that while Wiesels writing was describing the most horrendous events the world has ever seen, the exquisite writing style meant that you were torn between enjoying the book and reading it to the end without