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A review by notwellread
Night: Memorial Edition by Elie Wiesel
5.0
Night recounts the experiences of Elie Wiesel, a then-15-year-old Hungarian Jew whose community is captured by the Nazis and is sent to a concentration camp, remaining within this system for three years. As the Red Army inches closer, he chronicles his frequent moves through a number of death camps as the Nazis push their prisoners away from the front lines, including Auschwitz-Birkenau (near the beginning), and the agonising, endless forced running through the snow to reach Buchenwald (at the end). This harrowing journey is interspersed with episodes of the horrors he witnessed and experienced, alongside his loss of faith.
Despite this, the tone is not dramatic, and the whole account is related very simply and straightforwardly. In the preface, Wiesel describes the difficulty of choosing the words for his narrative. He says that “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was” — there will be a large part of his experiences that cannot be conveyed, but this book can at least aim to give us the impression of his experiences. Wiesel writes in a very plain way, but I think he wanted to state the facts directly partly to avoid accusations that his narrative is in any way embellished or exaggerated through his writing, and partly because the horror of the events does not require it. Since he stressed that he wanted his message to be heard as widely as possible, it also makes sense to write it in a way that makes the incomprehensible as easy to comprehend as possible. It is one thing to describe the chimney of Auschwitz, another to understand the deeper significance it held to the inmates that went so much beyond what the word can convey. It is one thing to say you saw a son murder his father for a piece of bread; another to see it with your eyes. It would not be enough to write it like a fictional narrative, or even most memoirs, where the author aims to convey the idea of a situation and that must be found sufficient. The struggle of telling the story, the incommunicable part, is explaining the deeper feeling and impression of witnessing it all first hand, which Wiesel cannot convey to the reader.
Perhaps the style is also meant to reflect how the horror became mundane to people over time: the brutality of the camp is characterised by routine, the Nazis perform their jobs with general indifference, and even the local communities seem nonplussed by the emaciated Jews forced to march through their streets. The way that genocide was normalised into routine by the Nazis through bureaucracy and regulation, which allowed those involved in the work a degree of separation from the victims, is often commented upon, but Wiesel shows us that the horror reverberates nonetheless. That these people were capable of doing such things cannot be explained away by protocol, victim dehumanisation, or ‘just following orders’: we cannot attribute their disassociation to these easy explanations.
The question remains, therefore, of how: how could people allow this to happen, let alone actively participate? Although it can’t be attributed entirely to the bureaucracy and routines of the camp, the setup of the operation is important to understanding this. Although the camps are run by the SS, and their authority is used to strike terror into the inmates during roll call and other official routines, much of their day-to-day activity is overseen by ‘Kapos’, fellow inmates given roles of authority over the others. Kapos were often violent criminals and were expected to brutalise and terrorise the political, religious, and racial prisoners. While Nazi tactics such as this are key to understanding the psychological manipulation of the camp system that allowed them to keep the prisoners under their thumb and avoid uprisings, Wiesel is also keen to stress how much of their suffering lay in the Nazis’ tactics to turn victim against victim, not just through the Kapos but also the frequent occasions upon which inmates would brutalise one another and steal each other’s food. The horrors of the Nazi regime cannot be blamed entirely on Germans, German-ness, or even the Nazi regime itself, but stem from something we have in common that lies deeply within the human condition — hence his urge to be vigilant against this mentality today.
In his fruitless search for answers, Wiesel truly stares into the void. The foundations of his young life had revolved around his devout observance of Judaism, a belief that turns to ash in light of his experiences in the camps. So much of Jewish scripture follows the same pattern: God shows the Israelites their path; they rebel against him; God punishes them; God tries to set them to rights again. Even as they gather in the camp for Rosh Hashanah, the Jews cry to God for forgiveness for their sins. Even in their wretched circumstances, the Jews gather to worship and ask for forgiveness, but are met with silence. Naturally, Wiesel struggles to reconcile himself with the idea that what he is experiencing is somehow a deserved punishment, that his people had done something equal to that penalty which needed forgiveness: “I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy.” Not only has his religious upbringing failed him, but he loses faith in the common humanity of those around him, and what God was meant to represent within them.
Wiesel, being focused on the inexplicability of the Holocaust, is also not willing to explain away his survival, and does not attempt to rationalise it. It also feels reductive to attribute it to ‘the strength of the human spirit’, though he does acknowledge the impulse of the will to live when he starts to fall asleep in the snow after running countless kilometres through the freezing night on the way to Buchenwald, only to realise that he will die there if he falls asleep and therefore chooses to remain awake. Many close calls between life and death, as one would expect. His account stresses that he is not necessarily lucky or blessed to have survived (of course, a ‘lucky’ person would never have experienced such things in the first place). It is not a series of close escapes either; the chances he takes all go against him (for instance, refusing to give up his shoes but losing them anyway; managing to keep his gold tooth from the dentist but having it extracted with a rusty spoon by another inmate; fleeing the infirmary at one camp, fearing execution, only to find out that those who remained were liberated two days after the other inmates’ departure; enduring the endless journey to Buchenwald with his father only for his father to die at their destination). He still ultimately managed to survive, but states in the preface that he cannot explain the reason for his survival — not luck, or strategy, or even resilience. Perhaps those who would try to cite a reason for some surviving where so many died are trying too much to apply reason to an ultimately mad and meaningless event. Wiesel is keen to stress that there is no inherent significance to his survival, and he has not in some way proved superior for having survived; his role is to remind us of the equal significance and the suffering of those who are no longer here to speak for themselves.
Despite this, the tone is not dramatic, and the whole account is related very simply and straightforwardly. In the preface, Wiesel describes the difficulty of choosing the words for his narrative. He says that “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was” — there will be a large part of his experiences that cannot be conveyed, but this book can at least aim to give us the impression of his experiences. Wiesel writes in a very plain way, but I think he wanted to state the facts directly partly to avoid accusations that his narrative is in any way embellished or exaggerated through his writing, and partly because the horror of the events does not require it. Since he stressed that he wanted his message to be heard as widely as possible, it also makes sense to write it in a way that makes the incomprehensible as easy to comprehend as possible. It is one thing to describe the chimney of Auschwitz, another to understand the deeper significance it held to the inmates that went so much beyond what the word can convey. It is one thing to say you saw a son murder his father for a piece of bread; another to see it with your eyes. It would not be enough to write it like a fictional narrative, or even most memoirs, where the author aims to convey the idea of a situation and that must be found sufficient. The struggle of telling the story, the incommunicable part, is explaining the deeper feeling and impression of witnessing it all first hand, which Wiesel cannot convey to the reader.
Perhaps the style is also meant to reflect how the horror became mundane to people over time: the brutality of the camp is characterised by routine, the Nazis perform their jobs with general indifference, and even the local communities seem nonplussed by the emaciated Jews forced to march through their streets. The way that genocide was normalised into routine by the Nazis through bureaucracy and regulation, which allowed those involved in the work a degree of separation from the victims, is often commented upon, but Wiesel shows us that the horror reverberates nonetheless. That these people were capable of doing such things cannot be explained away by protocol, victim dehumanisation, or ‘just following orders’: we cannot attribute their disassociation to these easy explanations.
The question remains, therefore, of how: how could people allow this to happen, let alone actively participate? Although it can’t be attributed entirely to the bureaucracy and routines of the camp, the setup of the operation is important to understanding this. Although the camps are run by the SS, and their authority is used to strike terror into the inmates during roll call and other official routines, much of their day-to-day activity is overseen by ‘Kapos’, fellow inmates given roles of authority over the others. Kapos were often violent criminals and were expected to brutalise and terrorise the political, religious, and racial prisoners. While Nazi tactics such as this are key to understanding the psychological manipulation of the camp system that allowed them to keep the prisoners under their thumb and avoid uprisings, Wiesel is also keen to stress how much of their suffering lay in the Nazis’ tactics to turn victim against victim, not just through the Kapos but also the frequent occasions upon which inmates would brutalise one another and steal each other’s food. The horrors of the Nazi regime cannot be blamed entirely on Germans, German-ness, or even the Nazi regime itself, but stem from something we have in common that lies deeply within the human condition — hence his urge to be vigilant against this mentality today.
In his fruitless search for answers, Wiesel truly stares into the void. The foundations of his young life had revolved around his devout observance of Judaism, a belief that turns to ash in light of his experiences in the camps. So much of Jewish scripture follows the same pattern: God shows the Israelites their path; they rebel against him; God punishes them; God tries to set them to rights again. Even as they gather in the camp for Rosh Hashanah, the Jews cry to God for forgiveness for their sins. Even in their wretched circumstances, the Jews gather to worship and ask for forgiveness, but are met with silence. Naturally, Wiesel struggles to reconcile himself with the idea that what he is experiencing is somehow a deserved punishment, that his people had done something equal to that penalty which needed forgiveness: “I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy.” Not only has his religious upbringing failed him, but he loses faith in the common humanity of those around him, and what God was meant to represent within them.
Wiesel, being focused on the inexplicability of the Holocaust, is also not willing to explain away his survival, and does not attempt to rationalise it. It also feels reductive to attribute it to ‘the strength of the human spirit’, though he does acknowledge the impulse of the will to live when he starts to fall asleep in the snow after running countless kilometres through the freezing night on the way to Buchenwald, only to realise that he will die there if he falls asleep and therefore chooses to remain awake. Many close calls between life and death, as one would expect. His account stresses that he is not necessarily lucky or blessed to have survived (of course, a ‘lucky’ person would never have experienced such things in the first place). It is not a series of close escapes either; the chances he takes all go against him (for instance, refusing to give up his shoes but losing them anyway; managing to keep his gold tooth from the dentist but having it extracted with a rusty spoon by another inmate; fleeing the infirmary at one camp, fearing execution, only to find out that those who remained were liberated two days after the other inmates’ departure; enduring the endless journey to Buchenwald with his father only for his father to die at their destination). He still ultimately managed to survive, but states in the preface that he cannot explain the reason for his survival — not luck, or strategy, or even resilience. Perhaps those who would try to cite a reason for some surviving where so many died are trying too much to apply reason to an ultimately mad and meaningless event. Wiesel is keen to stress that there is no inherent significance to his survival, and he has not in some way proved superior for having survived; his role is to remind us of the equal significance and the suffering of those who are no longer here to speak for themselves.