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.
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.’