Night

Contrary to the point of this blog, Elie Wiesel's book Night did not come from the library. I bought it at a garage sale in July 2008 for a dime, and it has sat, untouched, on my nightstand until just a few days ago. I had plenty of time in the intervening six months to read it -- after all, the 1980 edition I have is a short 109 pages -- but I had a vague notion of the horrors within the covers, so I kept putting it to the side in favor of books that were not so weighty, not so disturbing.

A few weeks ago Pope Benedict XVI caused a ruckus when he lifted the excommunication of four bishops who had been expelled from the proverbial flock 20 years ago. It was revealed that one of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson, is a Holocaust denier who claims the gas chambers did not exist and the Nazis really didn't murder six million Jews. Read one account of it here.

To karmically spite Williamson and Benedict, I realized it was time to wear my intellectual ovaries on the outside and quit hiding from history like those two apparently had been doing for the last 60 years. Those were the longest 109 pages I have ever read. It took several days for me to finish it because I could only ingest it in small doses. Part of me wanted to keep reading because it is such a compelling, important story, but I could only deal with so much of the disgusting trauma inflicted on Wiesel and his family a little at a time.

Night is Wiesel's account of his year in three Nazi death camps: Birkenau, Auschwitz and Buna. He tells of the collective unease and hopeful disbelief in his Polish village as they heard rumors of Nazi brutality towards Jews elsewhere. The Germans won't make it to Sighet, they thought. The Russians will defeat Hitler and the war will be over soon. When the Russians didn't stop the progress of the Nazis, the Jews in Sighet were systematically moved to a Jewish ghetto. Since the ghetto was unguarded, Jews had the opportunity to flee to another village. Many believed they were being corralled just so the Nazis could steal their money and valuables. Wiesel effectively conveys the Jewish ambivalence towards their seemingly indifferent captors. They didn't believe that the horrors they heard quietly whispered before the Nazi arrival could possibly be true, let alone happen to them.

Soon, they were transported street by street via cattle car to the concentration camps. Here, the appalling conditions began. The Jews were given no food, no room to lay down (they could sit only by taking turns), and a filthy bucket for a toilet as they rode for days to their final destination. If anyone escaped, they were told, the whole carload of 80 would be shot.

Upon arrival at Birkenau -- the reception center for Auschwitz -- the men and women were separated. That was the last time Wiesel saw his mother and sister. A prisoner told Wiesel and his father to lie about their ages to keep them together: Elie was now an 18-year-old man instead of a 14-year-old boy, and his father lost 10 years and was now only 40. Otherwise, Elie would have been sent with the other children, and his father may have been considered too old and infirm to work, thus relegating him to the furnaces they were shown on their initial march through the compound.

Wiesel continues to recount the beatings, hangings, starving, night-long marches through the snow without coats, the stench of dying bodies, the death. As his father's body started to deteriorate under the brutality, Elie wrestles with his own feelings of guilt for wanting his father to die so that he may have a better chance of surviving. He also sinks into a spiritual crisis; in Sighet, he was a devout student of the Kabbalah, but now he believes the Nazi treatment of the Jews is the twisted proof that God does not exist.

Night ends with the liberation of Buchenwald by the Americans. After their release, all these tormented, barely-alive humans wanted was food. Elie was the only member of his family to survive the death camps. Wiesel did not once mention gas chambers, though his explicit depiction of all of the other disgusting horrors that one human could inflict on another is enough to make one wonder how the world turned a blind eye to the terrors contained within the barbed wire. We need to stop the apathy and indifference. Bishop Williamson, this book should be on your nightstand next. (When you're done, lend it to your boss.)