Night by Elie Wiesel: A Review
- polsodepthindu
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
How does it feel to wish, even for a second, for one’s father to be dead? How does it feel to kill or be killed for a loaf of bread? How does it feel to be numb even when you are alive? How does it feel to not feel God anymore? If you want your questions to be answered, then Night by Elie Wiesel is the perfect book. A Nobel Prize winner, this book is not as brief in its profundity as it is in its length. It is an autobiographical account that chronicles the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi rule. Elie Wiesel emotively captures the torments faced by his teenaged self in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and how he managed to survive ‘death’ itself and tell the world its share of the darkest secrets. Although I am the kind of person who is not moved by even the most heart-touching of books or movies, this book left me wanting to abandon it halfway through for I was afraid that it might leave me welling up and frustrated at the end. But to review it, it was imperative that I go through the same hellish journey that the author went through. And so, I did.
The author or Eliezer and his family live in a small Transylvanian village of Sighet which was a part of Hungary at the time. The describes how the signs of trouble that came in early were ignored by the Jews. In 1942, when Moishe, a foreign Jew, came back to the town after a deathly escape from a concentration camp, his warnings were eagerly ignored. Even when the Fascist government had seized power in 1944, the people were not worried. It was only when the German troops had penetrated the Hungarian territory that the tension spread. From thereon, the situation spiralled down further and further, eventually reaching the abyss of human sentiment. As soon as the German forces (SS) came, the Jewish residents were ghettoized and told to wear the Star of David as a mark of recognition. Soon, the author and his family were evacuated in nauseating conditions to a place that they had never heard of: “Auschwitz”. This camp located in Poland was the final destination of the “final solution” that we are to witness in the book, loud and clear.
Soon, at the camp, men and women were separated and that was the last that Eliezer ever saw of his mother and youngest sister. Left with his father, Eliezer would soon learn about the horrors of Auschwitz; about the flames and the chimney and of course, the little children. It was imperative in the camp to work, for if it was not work, then something else would consume the men: flames of the crematorium. “…you will be burned! Burned to a cinder! Turned into ashes!” There was no place for the weak in the camp and thus to prove themselves as outstanding, a ‘selection’ would be done to segregate the useful ones from the soon-to-be-burned alive. It was in these unusual circumstances of life that Eliezer would find himself wanting to give up his life and be dead for good but in others, he would be grateful to live another day to eat an extra bowl of soup, and again in still others, he would declare that God is dead.
The only constant in the author’s life was the exceptional bond with his father. It kept him alive through the ordeals that a boy of his age could not even imagine. In 1945, when the Russians were approaching the Auschwitz, the inmates were to be evacuated to another camp-Buchenwald-and the journey to it was to change Eliezer forever, searing in his memory a change of heart which engulfed him in an ineluctable guilt that was to remain with him for a long time.
At the outset the author vehemently expresses his trust towards God, only to find himself ripped apart by the same God. After witnessing the mind-numbing realities of his life and the other like him, he questions the mercy of God. His faith in him becomes so precarious that he doubts his existence and asks, if there was ever a God, why would he trouble his own followers so cruelly. Once when he witnesses the hanging of a beautiful small boy whom everybody in the camp loved, he thinks about the existence of God: “Where He is? This is where-hanging here from this gallows.”
The account is one of a kind in that it portrays the fatigue, the despair, and the bloodshed borne by the people in a harrowing way so much so that not only the persecuted themselves wish to be dead, the readers too would want all their troubles to be ceased, once and for all. The portrayal of the barbaric SS would remind us of the scenes from the movie-Schindler’s List where Hitler’s stone-cold forces would treat people like dogs and shoot them as they pleased, only that there would be no Oskar to rescue the inmates in a world full of Amons.
Further, Eliezer paints a grisly picture of humanity where the blood and the gore becomes concomitant with the name of a whole community and faith and invincibility with that of one man: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all promises, to the Jewish people.” Jarring as it is, what Eliezer feels here must have reverberated through the lives of all the Jews-living or dead-since, since were it not for him, the six million Jews would not have vanished off the earth; they would not have to work like animals on command; they would not have to abandon their God; and they would not be made living corpses. It was due to his promise that the Jews became a kind of their own: “We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything-death, fatigue, our natural deeds”. Hitler had done his job with so much finesse, indeed!
Eliezer, also, depicts the naked face of humanity without a hint of airbrushing the reality. Be it risking being shot for an extra pot of soup or putting one’s own father’s body into the furnace or trampling one’s knowns while scratching for an inch of extra space, the portrayal of life in the drudgeries of concentration camps is as harrowing as it is revolting. We are presented with instances that would never have occurred in anyone’s life had it not been for the Nazis. On the train to Buchenwald, the German would amuse themselves on seeing the half-dead and hungry Jews come to life when they would throw bread crumbs on the train. A fight would ensue in which men, clutching at straws, become savages, and are ready to kill for an extra piece to survive, inducing poignance that is never to leave one’s imagination.
The reality is harsh and tragic, but it is also tinged with hope. Hope is offered when the men stick together for the selection; when the author and his father pass the selection; when the people believe that they would soon be liberated by the Red Army and things would be back to normal. Hope is palpable, but only rarely. Marred by the trials and tribulations of the camp, the Jews soon become accustomed to their eclipsing lives, thus a narrative shaped by both-tragedy and resilience.
Towards the end, Eliezer presents a picture of a life in the camp that is devoid of all relations, all meanings, where everyone is to fend for themselves. Eliezer himself remains afraid of what the camp would do to his love for his father for he had seen many sons abandoning their own father for a mere loaf of bread or for not keeping up due to their aging bodies. Alas, this affliction soon penetrates the author’s tender heart; his affection and love for his father, soon makes way surreptitiously for the morbid feelings regarding his burdening speed and ailing body: “Too late to save your old father…you could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup…”, he thinks. His circumstances force him to be corrupt at such a small age even if it is for a second. Such was the insidious extent of Hitler’s destruction.
Elie Wiesel’s book is stark, uncertain, and terrorizing. It brings out an eye-witness account of the worst that the Nazi state of Hitler brought out in men. It tells us about the slow poison that the lives of Jews had become, leading to their wishing for an instant death for themselves or for the others, whichever made the agony abate sooner. The book is sure to leave you teared-eyed as it did to me for it stirs within you a humanity that you never knew you had. And that is what makes it agonizing, oh no! very agonizing to read.
ABOUT WRITER
Ananya Gupta is a second year student of Political Science at Hindu College. She is an avid reader and has a passion for passing her time, delving into music movies and stories of all kinds.
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