Book Review: The Night Trilogy

Book Review: The Night Trilogy Consisting Of A Memoir, Translated By Marion Wiesel, And Two Novels: Night, Dawn, Day

Author: Elie Wiesel

Publisher: Hill and Wang A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

339 pages, paperback

Author

Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, award-winning author of 57 books, Nobel Peace Prize winner, professor, and political activist.

Night

In his "Preface to the New Translation" of Night, Elie Wiesel begins by stating: "If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one." (p. 5) He then claims that it is the key to understanding all of his other works. Then he goes on to reflect on why he wrote Night. 

Night was a testimony written by Wiesel as a witness to what happened in the Holocaust. It was written as a moral obligation to prevent the enemy from succeeding in erasing their crimes from history. "Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew I must bear witness." (p. 6)

According to Wiesel: "Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know." (p. 7) Hence the necessity of Holocaust survivors being witnesses and bearing testimony to the world.

Wiesel grew up in the town of Sighet in Transylvania. He was a devout Jew who studied Talmud, the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah and attended synagogue.

Wiesel describes how his mentor, the Beadle, Moishe had escaped from the Nazis and came back to Sighet to warn the people there of how the Nazis were killing Jews and that their lives were in danger. Tragically no one, including Wiesel, believed him. Some thought he was even mad.

No one believed the Nazis would come to Sighet, until one day they did.

When the Nazis came, they systematically destroyed the rights, privileges and freedoms of the Jews in Sighet. They also took their silver, gold, jewelry, and other valuables. Then they were loaded into box cars and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

On the first day in the concentration camp Wiesel witnessed people being thrown into a burning pit, including young children and babies. Witnessing this evil, he wrote: 

"Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes." (p. 52)

One day, a young boy along with two men were hanged, and all the other prisoners had to watch. The boy however remained alive for over half an hour. Everyone had to walk past him. Behind Wiesel a man asked: "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me (Elie), I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows...."(p. 83)

Wiesel tells of the Jews in the concentration camp participating in the last day of the year--Rosh Hashanah service. Rather than blessing God's name, Wiesel asks God some difficult questions, functioning like a prosecuting lawyer, placing God on trial. 

"How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?" (p. 84)

Wiesel goes on to say: "I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without (sic) man. Without love or mercy." (p. 86)

Wiesel goes on to describe the cruel struggle for survival until the Americans arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. 

Dawn

In his Preface to this, his first novel, Wiesel describes the setting: Palestine under Great Britain, prior to the state of Israel. He also describes the protagonist, Elisha, a member of the Jewish resistance. Wiesel also mentions some of the questions raised in the novel such as: good and evil, hatred and revenge, terror and justice.

Elisha was a young 18-year-old Holocaust survivor. He left Buchenwald concentration camp to live in France. One day he met Gad, a messenger, who recruited Elisha to join the Jewish resistance Movement for an independent homeland. 

A Movement fighter, David ben Moshe was captured by the English and he was to be executed at dawn--rejecting appeals to show clemency. 

The Movement had captured British Captain John Dawson. Elisha was assigned the responsibility of executing Dawson at dawn.

The Movement told the British that for every Movement member the British captured and executed the Movement would capture and execute a British soldier. Their ideology was to use violent, terrorist tactics against the English to force them out of Palestine. 

"If we must become more unjust and inhuman than those who have been unjust and inhuman to us, then we shall do so. The commandment Thou shalt not kill was given from the summit of one of the mountains here in Palestine, and we were the only ones to obey it. But that's all over; we must be like everybody else. Murder will be not our profession but our duty." (pp. 162-163)

According to the Movement's leader, called the Old Man, they were to live by the eleventh commandment--hate your enemy.

The night before Elisha is going to kill John Dawson, he is plagued with the following thoughts: "He who has killed one man alone is a killer for life. He may choose another occupation, hide himself under another identity, but the executioner or at least the executioner's mask will always be with him." (p. 195)

Day

Day, Wiesel's second novel, is a sequel to Dawn. 

The protagonist in the novel is hit by a taxi crossing Times Square in Manhattan, and struggles between life and death.

Is there meaning in life after Auschwitz? The tragedy of indifference and survivor's guilt are, among others, themes in this novel. 

After surviving surgery, the protagonist's worst enemy was a fever. He tells the doctor: "You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man (sic) carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn't others. It's ourselves." (p. 245)

The novel then moves to Paris, where the protagonist--who is still not named--meets Kathleen. In the beginning of the book he had been with Kathleen on their way to a movie, when the taxi hit him. 

In his thoughts, the protagonist struggles with theodicy and seems angry with God. "Man (sic) prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice." (p. 264)

"Yes, God needs man (sic). Condemned to eternal solitude, He made man (sic) only to use him as a toy, to amuse Himself." (p. 265)

The protagonist--a Holocaust survivor, seems like he is Elisha from the first novel, even though he's still not named--suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and has nightmares and screams. 

Elisha's thoughts as a Holocaust survivor are imprisoned by the past: "You cannot hide suffering and remorse for long. They come out. It was true: I was living in the past. Grandmother, with her black shawl on her head, wasn't giving me up." (p. 325)

He continues this line of thought concerning survivor's guilt: "We cannot forget. The images are there in front of our eyes. We feel ashamed and guilty to be alive, to eat as much bread as we want, to wear good, warm socks in the winter." (p. 325)

At the end of the novel, a Hungarian artist friend, Gyula, appears. He speaks of life and death and shares his thoughts about their meaning. He leaves by carrying out one final act.

These three works of Elie Wiesel are very sobering, difficult and challenging to read. However, I would recommend them as essential resources on the Holocaust. 

A recent visit to Yad Vashem

[ INTRODUCTORY NOTE: I thank the Rev. Dr. Gary Watts for giving me permission to post the pictures below, taken while he visited Yad Vashem recently, along with his brief commentary. Dim Lamp ]

                                                                       Yad Vashem

                                                                        Yad Vashem

Two days ago, I visited the Yad Vashem memorial. I hadn’t been there for a few years. So sadly moving to see results in real life of human evil.

Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day - Continued

[ INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO READERS: The following, Spirit-inspired letter was sent to me by my friend Fritz Voll, who has devoted many years to Jewish-Christian Relations, as well as an active member on the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, and was the founding webmaster of the excellent cyber library and reference website, Jewish-Christian Relations. This website is, in my humble opinion, the best of  its kind in the world. Fritz has kindly given me permission to publish his letter here on my blog, many thanks Fritz, and blessings always!  Dim Lamp ]

Dear Garth,

Thank you very much for writing and pointing me to your blog. I had just taken a break from reading the book of Sidney Cyngiser about his Holocaust ordeal, when I read your mail and looked up your blog. I started to write something directly into the Web page but then thought, this is getting too long, so I decided to send my comment to you as email. You can perhaps then put whatever you want into the comment box, the whole thing or just a few sentences. You can of course also make page of it as a letter from a friend of yours, whatever you decide will be fine with me.

Here it is:

---------------------------------

It is Friday, the 29th of April, two days before Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I am reading the book that my dear Jewish friend, Sidney Cyngiser has just published. He and his wife Bronia are Holocaust survivors whom I met in Calgary, AB, about 27 years ago. He is six years older than I, and was as young teenager together with his family forcefully taken by German soldiers from their home in Radom, Poland. His mother and siblings were sent to the gas chambers in Treblinka and murdered, while he and his father were chosen ('selected' they called it) to do slave labour at only about 17 years of age. He survived the hunger, cruelty of the guards and hard labour in more than one concentration camp and in the end the death-march from the east of Germany to Stuttgart-Vaihingen in the west. Diseased and as a skeleton of skin and bones he was freed by the American army and received prolonged medical care, only to see other survivors die around him with no chance to survive their survival. In hospital he had met Bronia, a child survivor of the camps.

I am reading the book as a German who came to Canada and to the City of Calgary rather late in life with my wife and three teenagers. I was 46 then and at age 53 I met Sidney at a Holocaust Symposium for high school students that I attended as a German in order to answer questions about the new democratic Germany. I also met adult children of survivors -- they were called the "Second Generation." Some of them encouraged me to stand with them as witness of what had happened, they considered me "Second Generation" as well, being a German of the generation after that of the perpetrators of the Shoah, the Holocaust.

When I first met Sidney, he accepted me with open arms and an open heart. After having had studied the Holocaust already in my youth soon after WW II, I had expected to be shunned by survivors. I had never before met one before in Germany and here in Calgary were about 70, all integrated in a vibrant Jewish community. After they had heard my views on the Shoah and my deep sorrow over what had been done and had perceived my utter condemnation of what was done in our name as Germans, some begun to trust me, and one of the first and most remarkable persons to do so was Sidney Cyngiser. We sat together and talked. He told me some of his experiences of German SS-guards that are so horrific that he would not relate them to the students. Sometimes I wept with him when we talked over the phone about the unspeakable cruelty of ordinary Germans who actually believed what their Nazi masters had told them about the Jews and enthusiastically or just in blind obedience debased, tortured and murdered the people of God's covenant, the people of the Christian Bible, whom Christians, for centuries, had considered only in a "theology of contempt" (Jules Isaac), who for Christians had been replaced by the church, who were expelled from 'Christian' countries and blamed for all the evils in the world for centuries.

In meeting these survivors I had to face recent German history again, but now in experiences of people like myself. Since that time the Jewish Shoah is present to me on every day of my life. When I hear the rumors people are spreading about other people -- I know where it can lead to. When I am in physical pain due to an illness, I think of the suffering of God's people Israel before they had a country of their own. When I hear and read about the denial of the Holocaust, I can sense how the survivors and their children are again hurting, because after all their unspeakable suffering that left deep wounds and scars in their bodies and souls, they are tortured again as liars. And then there are those, even 'Christians,' who blame the Jews for their fate, as people blame the raped woman for her ordeal. Every day new wounds are thoughtlessly or violently punched into the souls of the Jewish people in conversations, on the Internet and by badmouthing Israel, as if the young nation was not a nation of Jewish individuals, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, others of anti-Semitism in diverse countries who finally found a home, after no one wanted them.

Recently I translated a small German Anthology of Citations. Words by historians, philosophers, theologians and even perpetrators and survivors of the Holocaust that span the history of Germany from the outgoing 19th through the 20th century. A chorus of voices that can make us watchful for the early signs of discrimination against groups of people different to ourselves but no less human than we are.

The book that I am reading:

Sidney Cyngiser: Surviving the Survival: The Life Stories of Holocaust Survivors Sidney and Bronia Cyngiser. 2010, 484 pages. ISBN 978-0-9811715-0-0 . Contact: Sidney Cyngiser, 119 Canterville Rd SW, Calgary, AB T2W 4R2 Tel: (403) 238-3788)

The small book I translated from the German:

Konrad Goerg, We are what we Remember: Germans, Two Generations after Auschwitz. Voices to Remind Us.

116 pages. http://konrad-goerg.com/index.html

[Kindle Edition]

http://www.amazon.com/We-are-what-remember-ebook/dp/B0041VXTPW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AZC9TZ4UC9CFC&s=digital-text&qid=1283734336&sr=8-1

[Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/3866283423/ref=tmm_pap_used_olp_0/187-8181332-7085711?ie=UTF8&qid=1283734336&sr=8-1&condition=used

------------------------------------

I don't know if I told you about the Holocaust Education Week that takes place in Toronto in November of each year, organized by the Jewish community and the Christian-Jewish Dialogue of Toronto. They had 100 different events during the week last November in libraries, schools, churches and synagogues (not in a mosque). I attended an event in Markham at a Baptist church, whose senior pastor has become a good friend since, and at a synagogue, where I heard Prof. Harold Troper speak, one of the writers of the book "None is too Many."

Thanks again and every blessing to you and yours.

Fritz

Movie Review

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

Based on the authorized biography, Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Irena Sendler Story, by Anna Mieszkowska, this movie, directed by John Kent Harrison, is a must-view for all historians and those interested in the Holocaust movie genre.

Irena Sendler, a Polish-Catholic social worker (played by Anna Paquin) in the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto, is deeply disturbed by the deplorable conditions due to the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her passion and compassion are evident as she hatches an ingenious plan to rescue Jewish children out of the Ghetto, under the noses of Nazi soldiers. The description “courageous heart,” is a very apt one. I was moved by the comment of Irena to her mother when the latter tried to warn Irena not to risk her life for saving the Jews. Irena replied to her mother, by quoting her dad who was a doctor and friend of the Jews: “I remember that father said: ‘If you see a man drowning, you must still try to save him, even if you cannot swim.’”

True to her word, Irena was most successful in organizing an underground network to rescue over 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, at first it was quite a challenge for Irena to convince the Jewish parents and a rabbi that she was doing the right thing. One of the fears was that the Jewish children would lose their Jewish faith and become Christians. Irena tried to assure them that that was not her motive or plan. The movie succeeded in emphasising the deep agony it caused both the Jewish parents and children to be separated from each other—some of them likely knowing they would never see one another again. It is amazing that not one rescued child was ever betrayed or discovered by the Nazis. The children were given false identification documents and placed in convents and with Polish families. Irena was meticulous in keeping hidden records of each child’s Jewish name and where they found refuge; hoping that the children would be reunited with their Jewish parents after World War II.

Eventually, the Gestapo found out about Sendler, arrested and tortured her by beating and breaking her feet. As she was taken to be executed by a firing squared, the underground Zegota were able to rescue her.

At the end of the movie, it was touching to listen to the real Irena Sendler, in a 2005 interview, exhorting viewers to remember the Jewish parents who gave up their children and never saw them again; and to remember also the many Polish parents who provided a home and refuge for the Jewish children; and later many had to give them up after the war, which was hard for them too.

The movie also stated that in 2007, Irena Sendler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in Warsaw in 2008 at 98 years-of-age.