Elie Wiesel: Night

Elie Wiesel (1928-) is a Jewish holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate who was born and raised in Romania. During WW2 his family was deported to several different concentration camps, with Wiesel spending time at both Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

After the war, Wiesel wrote about his experiences as a young boy in the concentration camps and his coping with "survivor guilt"after the war. His most famous book was Night, which is a fictional account of a young Jewish boy who survives the holocaust. Part of a trilogy, the other two books being Dawn and Day, Night is considered one of the most significant pieces of holocaust literature (the other two being The Diary of Anne Frank and If This Is a Man).

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In Night, Wiesel writes a roman a clef (new word for me!) about a boy named "Elie" which is similar to his own experiences in the Nazi death camps. He is a devout young Jew who cries when he thinks about the destruction of the "Temple" in Jerusalem (think 68 AD - 2000 years ago). His mother and sisters are sent to different concentration camps, but Elie remains with his father. Elie sees horrific things, such as babies being thrown into fiery ditches, prisoners killing each other over scraps of bread, and watching people murdered daily. It is not only the butchery of the Nazi's that disturbs him, but also the savagery and cruelty of his fellow prisoners.

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Elie declares that "God is dead" if he allows such barbaric and inhumane acts to occur. It is unfathomable that God could allow such things to happen if he knew of them. It reminds me of reading The Book of Job, where Job tries to comprehend how God could let such horrible things happen to him. This Old Testament story would have been very familiar to a devote Jew.

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In the end Elie survives, but his father does not.

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Dawn and Day continue Elie's story, but they feel very distinct from Night. However, Weisel continues with Elie's survivor guilt which over-shadows all his character's thoughts and actions. To a reader, it feels like too much reading about Elie thinking-about-death all of the time.

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In Dawn, Elie has moved to Palestine and is part of the Resistance against the British (circa 1947). The Resistance hopes to establish a free, Jewish state (Israel) and have resorted to terrorist tactics to achieve this. They ambush British convoys, kidnap and kill British soldiers and engage in other terrorist activity. Elie must kill a British officer and this causes him great consternation, since his knows what death is like. The most memorable line is when Elie is thinking about the concentration camps and his new role as executioner and he says, "Don't judge me, judge God".

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Day is another reflection on the holocaust, this time Elie has been hit by a car in New York City. The doctor and nurses struggle to keep him alive but are puzzled by Elie's acceptance of death. In particular, the doctor who fights hard to save lives cannot understand why a young man would be so unafraid of death.

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I enjoyed reading "Night" which I considered insightful, personal and a well-written narrative. I found "Dawn" and "Day" interesting, but they are a very different experience. I also found the dialogue in Dawn and Day to be really bad - real people would never talk like that!