Resisting the Night

Radio host Jerry Klein recently proposed “all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band.” Shockingly, many callers agreed. At the end of the show, Klein unveiled his hoax, commenting that his callers demonstrated "how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen.” He’s right. We need reminders of what the Holocaust involved and what allowed it to happen. Elie Wiesel attempts such a reminder in his novel, Night.
The book, which follows Wiesel’s teen years in German concentration camps, calls readers out of the darkness. People should learn from the past, keep informed, and resist the night, or ignorance. The Holocaust caused an entire people group to change for the worse, obfuscating and challenging everything they believed. Night doesn’t just deal with what happened; it deals with who let it happen.
Was it really such a shock that the Germans permitted the Holocaust? Nietzsche, Darwin, Spencer, and Materialism all supported the idea of the survival of the fittest, intellectual pride, and separation from God. Nobody thought it humanly possible to wipe out an entire people, especially in such a cultured nation as Germany. What was putatively thought of as a good thing (intellectual excellence) turned out for the worse. Wiesel tried to encourage his father, stating that humanity was their ally.
I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it.
“Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed, even these crematories….” (30)
Wiesel soon lost his own faith in humanity when he became a number: A-7713. Man’s sinful nature had vanquished humanity as a standard of morality. The Germans thought themselves superior and condemned all others, redefining “humanity.”
The Jews denied the danger. They forfeited their chance: the elders kept the younger from rebelling. If they tolerated God’s test, they thought, He would deliver them. Besides, it couldn’t get any worse. The point of no return came for Wiesel and his companions when their deportation train stopped at the Czechoslovak frontier. “We realized then that we were not going to stay in Hungary. Our eyes were open, but too late (21).” What chance of escape remained in revolt disappeared.
Since the Jews clung to such false hopes, did they bring this upon themselves? They hadn’t thought anything of the rumors of German violence; the Germans acted kindly when they quartered in Jews’ homes.
Our first impressions of the Germans were reassuring…. They never demanded the impossible, made no unpleasant comments, and even smiled occasionally at the mistress of the house. One German… brought Madame Kahn a box of chocolates. The optimists rejoiced. (7)
Even corralled into ghettos, the Jews were content.
We were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic…. We appointed a… whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it.... Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers…. (9)
After the Nazis expelled Moshe the Beadle with all the foreign Jews, “people were saying that they had arrived in Galicia, were working there, and were even satisfied with their lot (4).” Moshe had a different story. He managed to escape death and warn his fellow Jews of the coming Holocaust, but no one believed him.
Wiesel doesn’t blame the Jews, however. Wiesel blames God and never forgives him. His works question how God would let something like this happen. He wrote his first version of Night in Yiddish, but as he began to interpret his memories and they evolved in his mind, he began to bash Jewishness. He did not bash the Jews themselves; it was more about his own faith. Before the Holocaust, Wiesel studied and prayed regularly. By the end, he had lost his faith and did not know what to believe.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the faces if the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. (32)
When a young boy is hung, Wiesel comments that God is there hanging with him (62).
Night is as theological as historical. As Gary Henry says in his analytical essay, Story and Silence: Transcendence in the Work of Elie Wiesel,
He has assumed the role of messenger…. But he does not continue to retell the tales of the dead only to make life miserable for the living, or even to insure that such an atrocity will not happen again. Rather, Elie Wiesel is motivated by a need to wrestle theologically with the Holocaust. (1)
Wiesel proclaims himself a messenger for victims of the Holocaust. Many survivors disagree. Although memories torture most, some have healed. Peter Wood, who worked with Wiesel at Boston University as Associate Provost, says survivors he knows dislike talking about Wiesel.
Some survivors do not think their lives are about the past. My friend Sam loves people. That’s what you’re supposed to take away from these terrible times. Sam pours himself out to others and to his family.
Wiesel mirrors the opposite of this. He never forgives.
As his interest in theology grew, Wiesel’s memories evolved. As his memories turned into one, solid account in his mind, they became stereotypes. Primo Levi discusses how a memory can become a stereotype in his book, The Drowned and the Saved.
[A] memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of a raw memory and growing at its expense. (23-24)
The perfecting of Wiesel’s story accounted for the increasing number of translations of his books and his increasing popularity. As Wiesel tailored his books to what the audience wants and what the author now wants, they evolved into the very picture and representation of the Holocaust. Wiesel’s image has advanced to where few question him. Wiesel has published 16 books; Oprah Winfrey interviewed him for both her magazine and her TV show; and PBS and History Channel documentaries have used him.
Wood questions Wiesel, saying he has done much for Boston University, but with few scruples.
He sold papers to the university archives and never delivered them. Also, after winning the Nobel Prize, he didn’t have to teach as much. He flew in once a week for a hand selected class of five students. Yet the university continued to use his name as a ploy to get new students, and it worked.
Henry suggests that the “drive to justify every second of his existence (3)” motivates Wiesel, but Wood suggests that part of Weisel’s motivation might be the desire to win the Nobel Prize. Both are right. As his stories developed and Wiesel began to question how he, of all the Jews, managed to survive, he gained a proclivity for questioning God and humanity even more. This motivated him to insert more theological background into his works and to promote his own work. Since he wondered how he of all people survived, he felt his life needed to have worth. He climbed to the top, preserving himself and his message just as he preserved himself during the holocaust. At the camps, Wiesel struggled with whether or not he wanted his father to die. He felt he would have a better chance of survival without his father, but knew that thinking this was wrong. Today, it is Wiesel's message that is left behind to die. He's allowed the stereotyped story to take over and kill the original, factual story. While he may have started out with good intentions, everything he appears to be about has become just a perfected story. Wood said he sees only the performer in Wiesel. “His story became what he was about. Who knows what’s underneath the performer.”
Readers can forgive Wiesel’s doubts, knowing what the Holocaust did to him. Furthermore, Wiesel will doesn’t want the holocaust to happen again. According to Night, a number of things contributed, to the holocaust, including Germany’s pride and the Jew’s ignorance; all revolving around God and whether He is just. If Wiesel believes that he is the voice of the Holocaust victim, let him. He may not represent all his fellows, but he remains a messenger to the world. We need someone to remind us. In a day of Muslim threats and invading immigrants, we should apply the lessons of history. Looking at what caused past holocausts, we can help prevent future ones.