Reflections on "Night" by Elie Wiesel

When I was going into my freshman year, one of my summer projects for English was to read the novel, Night, by Elie Wiesel.  The novel is basically the author recounting his life in concentration camps during World War II.  I thought it was a great book at the time, but I didn't really appreciate his story fully until I had the opportunity to visit a concentration in Germany this past summer.  I was on a two-week tour with the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra in Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic.  During our trip, we performed, toured, and visited many cities.  One of the places we visited was Dachau, the very first concentration camp.  Being in the midst of where stories like Wiesel's actually took place was completely life changing.  When I got back from the tour, I wanted to go back and reread the book again with a different outlook.  Since the story is still some-what fresh in my head, I decided to talk about some of the major themes that I discovered from Wiesel's recount.

Having and Losing Faith in God

One of the main themes of Night is Eliezer's loss of religious faith. Throughout the book, Eliezer witnesses and experiences things that he cannot reconcile with the idea of a just and all-knowing God.

At the beginning of the narrative, Eliezer declares, "I believed profoundly." He is twelve years old and his life is centered around Judaism—studying the Talmud during the day, praying at the synagogue at night until he weeps with religious feeling. He wants to study the cabbala (Jewish mysticism), but his father says he's too young. Despite this, Eliezer finds a teacher in town, a poor man named Moché the Beadle, and the two of them pore over cabbalistic questions. Eliezer's faith in God is shared by many of his fellow Jews in the town of Sighet. On the trains to the concentration camps, people discuss the banishment from their homes as trial sent from God to be endured—a test of faith.

But Eliezer's belief in God begins to falter at the concentration camps of Birkenau-Aushwitz. Here the furnaces are busy night and day burning people. Here he watches German soldiers throw truckloads of babies and small children into the flames. The longer he stays in the concentration camps, the more he sees and experiences cruelty and suffering. People treat others worse than they would livestock. He can no longer believe that a God who would permit such nightmare places to exist could be just. The fact that many Jews do continue to pray, to recite the Talmud, and to look for comfort in their faith while in the concentration camp amazes and confounds Eliezer. That people would still pray to a God who allows their families to be gassed and incinerated suggests to Eliezer that people are stronger and more forgiving than the God they pray to. Later, as more people die, and others around him lose hope, starve, and succumb, Eliezer ceases to believe that God could exist at all. He is not alone in his disillusionment. Akiba Drumer (whose faith helps Eliezer endure for a while) as well as a rabbi whom Eliezer talks to, also eventually come to believe that God's existence is impossible in a world that contains such a large-scale, willful horror as the Holocaust. The final nail in the coffin, for Eliezer's faith, comes at Buna, where the prisoners are gathered to watch the hanging of a young boy. A man in the crowd asks, "Where is God now?" Eliezer's internal response is that God is that boy on the gallows. The boy dies slowly as the prisoners are forced to watch.

Inhumanity

One of the legacies of the Holocaust is the sheer scale of one group of people's inhumanity towards other groups of people. In the case of the Jews, the German government and German society attempted to redefine them as sub-human, and then as creatures who deserved to die.

But Night doesn't just focus on the Nazis and their seemingly endless diabolical behavior (concentration camp doctors—those who swear an oath to do no harm—are some of the worst offenders imaginable). The book also looks at what it is like for an adolescent to live in a situation where he and those around him are no longer treated as humans. The loss of humanity among the victims leads to all kinds of cruelty and callousness among the prisoners as they struggle to survive—prisoners are vicious towards each other, those with small powers abuse them, children abandon parents, starving people kill each other for scraps of food. In the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz, people strike a woman to keep her quiet, something they never would have done in the village. As Eliezer's father lies in his sickbed, near death, other invalids beat him up because he smells bad. Through Night, Elie Wiesel makes the point that when people are treated as subhuman and are subjected to the constant threat of death, they may lose the ability to act like a decent person—even towards others in the same situation. Empathy is one of the finest human qualities, but it can be crushed.

 

Fathers and Sons

As his family is being marched from its home, Eliezer sees his father weep for the first time. By the end of the book, his father is dead, another victim of the Nazi death camps. In between, Night explores the ways traditional father-son relationships break down under impossibly difficult conditions. At the heart of this theme is Eliezer's relationship with his own father. Yet the narrator also pays attention to other father-son relationships among the prisoners in the camps; his observations of other fathers and sons make him think about his duties to his own father.

In normal life, before the Holocaust began, Eliezer's father has great respect in the community and within Eliezer's house. The relationship of father to son is traditional—the biblical commandment to honor one's parents is paramount in Jewish families like Eliezer's. After the family is split up at Birkenau, Eliezer and his father have only each other to live for. As his father weakens, the traditional roles of protector and protected are reversed. It is Eliezer who must protect his father.

During their time in the camps, Eliezer time and again feels shame when he is angry at his father for not being able to avoid beatings or for not being able to march correctly. His father continues to look out for him—he gives Eliezer a few tools to keep when it looks like he will be taken away, and he rouses a neighbor to save his son when someone on the train begins to strangle Eliezer. But there's a limit to how much either can shield the other from hardship. And as conditions become more and more impossible, and the physically weaker and older begin to die, fathers become burdens—first to the consciences of sons, who feel guilty about their own survival instincts and their inability to protect their fathers, and then physical burdens, too. Eliezer sees an illustration of this in the death march to Gleiwitz when a young man leaves behind his tired father, a rabbi; and again on the train to Buchenwald, when a son kills his father while fighting for a morsel of bread. These instances of the disintegration of basic familial bonds help remind Eliezer of his love and duty to his own father. By the end of the book, though, his feelings hardly matter. Eliezer's father grows sick, doctors won't help, and Eliezer is simply unable to take care of or prevent others from harming his father.

 

Guilt and Inaction

On several occasions in Night, Eliezer watches as his father is beaten and can do nothing about it. Or, rather, he could perhaps help his father in the very short term, but he would quickly pay for it with his life. (Eliezer's father, too, must watch powerlessly as Eliezer is whipped by a kapo.) Even though a small act of resistance is the equivalent of suicide, Eliezer cannot help feeling guilt about his fear and his inaction. The whole of the imprisoned community must feel this same impotent rage. Weak and undernourished, surrounded by soldiers with machine guns, in a place where they are utterly expendable, the prisoners' options are limited in what they can do to defend themselves, without inviting torture and slaughter. But that doesn't make Eliezer feel any better about himself when an SS officer beats his dying father in the head with a truncheon, and Eliezer does nothing to prevent the act or to retaliate for it. By writing the book, however, he is taking action and preventing these and many other acts of brutality from going unrecorded.