Surviving The Long Night

An abridged version of this article was published on the Guardian's website: http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/aug/25/elie-wiesel-night-jewish-identity-amnesty-teen-takeover-2014


The impotence of language in the face of visceral horror should not be underestimated; words evade the tremulous pen. Authors revealing the sordid depths plumbed by mankind are thus wordsmiths of singular talent, who stare with unfaltering courage into the abyss.

‘Night’, Elie Wiesel’s account of his experiences during the Holocaust, is a memoir of prodigious power: his luminous humanity shines from every page as he bears witness to the tragedy which befell the Jewish race at the hands of the Nazis. Wiesel was a Romanian-born Jew whose home town of Sighet was occupied by the Hungarians for most of WWII. Although some foreign Jews were deported in 1942, it was not until May 1944 that German orders came to liquidate the ghetto. All the Jews – fifteen-year old Wiesel and his family among them – were forced into cattle wagons and transported to Auschwitz. It was an unfamiliar location to the new arrivals: some even had faith that families would remain together and work in tolerable conditions at a labour camp; the ‘wretched stench’ of burning flesh swiftly disabused them of these hopes.

They found themselves in the ‘demented and glacial universe’ of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where each of the four crematoria attended to the daily slaughter of several thousand Jews. It was only a fortuitous encounter with an inmate, who advised Wiesel and his father to lie about their ages, which resulted in their avoiding the gas chambers and being sent instead to Buna, a sub-camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz. His mother and sister, on the other hand, were taken straight to their deaths in a routine selection process which exemplified the Nazis’ brutal indifference to human life.

The concept of a name as a form of identification has been embedded in the human psyche for millennia. A person’s name is subliminally bound up in the fabric of their existence: it tethers them to the past and anticipates their future remembrance. When seeking to expunge every vestige of Jewish identity from Europe, the Nazis were not content to deracinate each Jew, rob them of their worldly possessions, shave their hair and clothe them in rags; the ultimate affront to their individuality was the replacing of every prisoner’s name with a number. This was integral to the Nazis’ dehumanisation of the Jews in their eyes: a number on a list carries far fewer intimate human connotations than a name.

In a grotesque parody of a baptism, Wiesel and the other inmates were ‘told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hands, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.’

Wiesel’s prose is quietly measured and economical, for florid exaggeration would not befit this subject. Yet at times his descriptions are so striking as to be breathtaking in their pungent precision. He writes through the eyes of an adolescent plunged into an unprecedented moral hinterland, whose loss of innocence is felt keenly by the reader. His identity was irrevocably altered in such conditions: ‘The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded – and devoured – by a black flame.’

Hunger was an immense force in the camps, eroding identities and sculpting them into different forms; it could compel a man of principle to steal or fight, whilst thoughts of food tormented prisoners’ dreams. Wiesel recalled one inmate whose starvation drove him to approach two untended cauldrons of soup on a suicidal mission, which resulted in his being shot by a guard. The victim fell to the floor writhing, ‘his face stained by the soup.’ As the Red Army’s onslaught swept west, Jews were transported into the heart of the Reich; after days without food, a passing German worker tossed a piece of bread into a wagon. Carnage followed: ‘Men were hurling themselves against each other, trampling, tearing at and mauling each other. Beasts of prey unleashed, animal hate in their eyes. An extraordinary vitality possessed them, sharpening their teeth and nails.’ Wiesel too asserted that his very existence was contingent on his next meal: ‘I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.’

Yet despite all the Nazis’ monstrous attempts to efface the Jewish identity, their victims’ indomitable spirit could not be extinguished. Material goods have no bearing on this impenetrable dignity, and another man’s inner workings are inaccessible to even the omnipotent despot. Wallowing in memories was a source of incomparable solace to many, whilst others clung tenaciously to their faith. This was not true of all - one prisoner observed bitterly that he had ‘more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises to the Jewish people’ - but Wiesel befriended two brothers with whom he would ‘sometimes hum melodies evoking the gentle waters of the Jordan River and the majestic sanctity of Jerusalem.’ Thus, his identity was besieged but not conquered: it became a taut membrane stretched across the soul.

The atrocities committed by the Nazis might have strangled hope and joy, but the flame of life refused to perish. Even in Wiesel’s darkest hours on the death march away from Auschwitz, when his mind was ‘numb with indifference,’ an atavistic awareness of survival kicked in. He recognised that if he slept in the icy night, he would not wake up: ‘Something in me rebelled against that death. Death which was settling in all around me, silently, gently. It would seize upon a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit.’ This resilience, alloyed with pure chance, meant that Wiesel not only preserved his own identity, but lived on to preserve the identity of his race in his writing.

The Jewish identity has been moulded by persecution since antiquity, yet the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism had a uniquely horrendous countenance and manifestation. Whilst fervent Zionists might still have secured the creation of Israel in the aftermath of WWII, the Holocaust played a significant role in shaping the belief that a homeland was vitally important for the Jews: it would enable them to salvage the remnants of their collective identity from the smouldering embers of their past. On a more universal level, and regardless of religion, experiences such as Wiesel’s leave an indelible mark; the magma of suffering rolls down the slopes of the victim’s identity and hardens into new contours and forms. ‘Night’ is profoundly necessary reading not just because it furnishes a chilling insight into the void that remains when man abandons all morality, but also, as Wiesel observed: ‘To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.’