Elie Wiesel's "Night"I contemplated for a while on whether or not I would read this account of a teen’s two-year experience in a concentration camp in Auschwitz from 1942 to 1944. Having recently visited the Holocaust Museum in DC, my emotions were already raw and my mind began churning…at 27, I had known so little about this real, 20th century occurrence, except for a chapter or two in high school history books. I knew people were wrongly put to death. I did not know 3 million people were tortured or that babies were flung in the air and shot; victims made to kill their own families or that the world turned their back on humankind. And naively, that people could truly posses such hate, such incredible hate and horror.
Yesterday I bought the book; Elie Wiesel's story of survival is like nothing I ever known. He describes how the spiritual, emotional self can revert back to its primitive animalist ways in order to live, breathe and survive. As I was reading, all I kept thinking of was how young a 14 year-old boy really is. He may be the tallest in his class, may even look 18, but in reality, his heart is innocent; he is still a little boy. At one part of the book, Elie truly begins to question his faith in God, for he feels God abandoned him and his people. While witnessing the hanging of a 5 year-old little boy, one of the prisoners screams, “Where is hope” and Elie thinks to himself that hope is in the eyes of the murdered child.
I mean the book blew me away. I feel so helpless….
Not because of the unbelievable physical abuse and conditions that these people underwent, (they walked more than 22 miles in the snow, many with no shoes on, not eating for 6 days except for the snow off the shoulder of the person in front of them) but of the incredible EMOTIONAL deconstruction that the INDIVIDUAL experienced. When the world discusses the Holocaust we rarely focus on the individual—basic human feelings, emotions. I cannot begin to encourage you to pay the 8 bucks and go get this book. It was a real eye opener for me; on one hand I question could this happen again, but right then I read Elie, asking his father, how could this happen in 1944?
Torture and hate happen everyday and maybe we just choose to ignore it. The notion of --this could never happen to me—in my mind has now disappeared. The Wiesels were a beautiful family of 6; were active in their community; they owned a home and had a great life. They were cattled off to place where no one knew the true depths of hate. Elie truly gives to the readers the emotions that each victim had felt, true fear and immense desperation.
As Elie explains, the number of survivors today is quickly diminishing. In order to not to make the Holocaust a distant memory, we must learn about it, teach it, so generations from now know that something like this really happened, and something like this can never happen again. We are unfortunately all responsible for hate and love. Today the stories have come alive. We cannot let these events become history. We cannot ever forget.
