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A review by shorshewitch
Night by Elie Wiesel
5.0
Nothing hurts more than raw words - spoken without a touch of euphemism.
How does one rate a book that stands out as a scalding evidence of horrors? How does one escape unhurt, unmoved from its burning touch?
Elie Wiesel’s memoir is not just gut-wrenching; it opens wounds you never knew were even inflicted upon you. The laceration torments and yet liberates. The words hit you hard and yet you know you cannot avoid them. They have to be read.
The book takes us through his life in Sighet, a small cozy town in northwestern Romania, to his (and his family’s) sudden deportation to a Jewish ghetto, to further as a part of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buna. Wiesel has laid “Holocaust”, and later “The Final Solution”, bare for us to witness, along with his memories of fellow Jewish prisoners. The race to survive the “selection”, the desire to deceive death when it stared right in the eye, the emotional and moral skirmishes to either keep the loved ones safe or to get rid of them for your own survival, the distortion of faith, slowly, one cell at a time, the cries that were sometimes silent, muffled and sometimes ear-splitting and thundering – Wiesel throws at us pieces, steadily, one after another, so you feel your skin peeling layer by layer, making you feel dazed, then vulnerable and then completely helpless.
This morning, after I finished reading this book, I took several moments to just orient myself to the world around me. I looked at the face of the kid sitting next to me in the bus and tried to find the face of the little girl who showed false documents in order to escape incarceration, lost her identity and took someone else’s just to find liberation – or some illusion of liberation. I looked further around and saw a young man, tried to find in his face the face of the boy who beat his father up for a few scraps of stale bread, to survive, to somehow, just somehow keep going.
Why was it so important for me to read and complete this book despite having cried right from the “Introduction”? It was important because I cannot forget that this happened, not so long ago, right here, just a few thousand miles away perhaps, but nonetheless right here, where human beings place such tremendous faith in something/someone they haven’t seen, but refuse to see the damnation of humanity right in front of them. The truth that all this can happen just as suddenly as if it were a dream, and as easily as kicking pebbles on the street, can no longer be shaken off from shoulders. It is the truth we all must acknowledge and act upon.
When you say “There could be nothing worse than this”, well, you haven’t been paying attention. There will ALWAYS be something worse. The “worse” is infinite, the levels of “worse” unbelievable. The irony is this – Human minds cannot fathom the monstrosities of their own – that they are capable to behold or to wreak.
________________________________________________________
Some passages from the book:
1) "My faceless neighbor spoke up: “Don't be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.” I exploded: “What do you care what he said? Would you want us to con- sider him a prophet?” His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”
2) "I tried to rid myself of my invisible assassin. My whole desire to live became concentrated in my nails. I scratched, I fought for a breath of air. I tore at decaying flesh that did not respond. I could not free myself of that mass weighing down my chest. Who knows? Was I struggling with a dead man? I shall never know. All I can say is that I prevailed. I succeeded in digging a hole in that wall of dead and dying people, a small hole through which I could drink a little air."
3) "Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God's sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…” That night, the soup tasted of corpses."
4) "THERE FOLLOWED days and nights of traveling. Occasionally, we would pass through German towns. Usually, very early in the morning. German laborers were going to work. They would stop and look at us without surprise. One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest.
YEARS LATER, I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Our ship's passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the “natives,” who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desper- ately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady: “Please, don't throw any more coins!” “Why not?” said she. “I like to give charity…”
And finally, from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speeck, on why musn’t we remain silent?
5) "How could the world remain silent?” And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere."
________________________________________________________
How does one rate a book that stands out as a scalding evidence of horrors? How does one escape unhurt, unmoved from its burning touch?
Elie Wiesel’s memoir is not just gut-wrenching; it opens wounds you never knew were even inflicted upon you. The laceration torments and yet liberates. The words hit you hard and yet you know you cannot avoid them. They have to be read.
The book takes us through his life in Sighet, a small cozy town in northwestern Romania, to his (and his family’s) sudden deportation to a Jewish ghetto, to further as a part of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buna. Wiesel has laid “Holocaust”, and later “The Final Solution”, bare for us to witness, along with his memories of fellow Jewish prisoners. The race to survive the “selection”, the desire to deceive death when it stared right in the eye, the emotional and moral skirmishes to either keep the loved ones safe or to get rid of them for your own survival, the distortion of faith, slowly, one cell at a time, the cries that were sometimes silent, muffled and sometimes ear-splitting and thundering – Wiesel throws at us pieces, steadily, one after another, so you feel your skin peeling layer by layer, making you feel dazed, then vulnerable and then completely helpless.
This morning, after I finished reading this book, I took several moments to just orient myself to the world around me. I looked at the face of the kid sitting next to me in the bus and tried to find the face of the little girl who showed false documents in order to escape incarceration, lost her identity and took someone else’s just to find liberation – or some illusion of liberation. I looked further around and saw a young man, tried to find in his face the face of the boy who beat his father up for a few scraps of stale bread, to survive, to somehow, just somehow keep going.
Why was it so important for me to read and complete this book despite having cried right from the “Introduction”? It was important because I cannot forget that this happened, not so long ago, right here, just a few thousand miles away perhaps, but nonetheless right here, where human beings place such tremendous faith in something/someone they haven’t seen, but refuse to see the damnation of humanity right in front of them. The truth that all this can happen just as suddenly as if it were a dream, and as easily as kicking pebbles on the street, can no longer be shaken off from shoulders. It is the truth we all must acknowledge and act upon.
When you say “There could be nothing worse than this”, well, you haven’t been paying attention. There will ALWAYS be something worse. The “worse” is infinite, the levels of “worse” unbelievable. The irony is this – Human minds cannot fathom the monstrosities of their own – that they are capable to behold or to wreak.
________________________________________________________
Some passages from the book:
1) "My faceless neighbor spoke up: “Don't be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.” I exploded: “What do you care what he said? Would you want us to con- sider him a prophet?” His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”
2) "I tried to rid myself of my invisible assassin. My whole desire to live became concentrated in my nails. I scratched, I fought for a breath of air. I tore at decaying flesh that did not respond. I could not free myself of that mass weighing down my chest. Who knows? Was I struggling with a dead man? I shall never know. All I can say is that I prevailed. I succeeded in digging a hole in that wall of dead and dying people, a small hole through which I could drink a little air."
3) "Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God's sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…” That night, the soup tasted of corpses."
4) "THERE FOLLOWED days and nights of traveling. Occasionally, we would pass through German towns. Usually, very early in the morning. German laborers were going to work. They would stop and look at us without surprise. One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest.
YEARS LATER, I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Our ship's passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the “natives,” who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desper- ately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady: “Please, don't throw any more coins!” “Why not?” said she. “I like to give charity…”
And finally, from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speeck, on why musn’t we remain silent?
5) "How could the world remain silent?” And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere."
________________________________________________________