Night

Elie Wiesel (Bantam Books)

5.0 out of 5.0 stars

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Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day in 1945, the Russian army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

This week, I read again Eli Wiesel’s compelling personal account of surviving the Holocaust. It’s a truly moving story and one that will break your heart. Wiesel catalogs his experiences as a Jew in Sighet, a small rural community in Transylvania, watching the horrors of anti-Semitism unfold. His story follows his life as a 15 year old, assigned first to the ghettos, then transported to Auschwitz, then to Buna, and finally to Buchenwald where he was liberated by the American forces. Wiesel survived: his mother, father and little sister did not.

As I read the book this time, what stood out to me the most was the incomprehensible nature of the depravity that emerged. Five examples stand out:

The first is the rejection of Moshe the Beadle. In the initial wave, all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet. Moshe the Beadle was one of them. Miraculously, he escaped and ultimately returned to the village to warn the Jews about what was really going on. The deportees hadn’t been relocated: they’d been taken to a forest and executed. We learn that “Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered their prisoner. Each one had to go up to the hole and present his neck. Babies were thrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets” (p.4).

But no one believes Moshe the Beadle. He is dismissed as a crazy old man who has lost his mind. The horrors he recounts are simply incomprehensible.

The second is the silence of the majority. Yet it was not only the silence it was the cold, calculating thinking that seemed to underlie the indifference. Wiesel describes being marched out in the deportation: “The town seemed deserted. Yet our friends of yesterday were probably waiting behind their shutters for the moment when they could pillage our houses” (p.19).

The third is the moment when Wiesel and his father are being marched to the barracks and see flames coming from a ditch. “They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load — little children. Babies!” (p.30).

The fourth is the execution of a young boy by hanging. This time the inhumanity was such that Wiesel tells us that even “the Lagerkap refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him” (p. 61). The boy was too light to die quickly. “For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed” (p.62).

The last is the sad sight of the German workmen who who seemed to enjoy watching the trainload of emaciated Jews fighting for pieces of bread: “a workman took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving me fought each other to the death for a few crumbs. The German workmen took a lively interest in this spectacle” (p.95).

In a time when Holocaust denial seems to be on the rise, we must never forget. Read this book. Tell a friend. Teach your children.