Background

Wiesel's story as told in Night

Moshe the Beadle

There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or the Kabbalah, but only of what he'd seen. People refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to him.

"The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it ..."

(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)

The barbed wire which fenced us in didn't cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department – a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers ...

It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto – it was illusion.

And there was I, on the pavement, unable to make a move. Here came the Rabbi, his back bent, his face shaved ... His mere presence among the deportees added a touch of unreality to the scene. It was like a page torn from some story book ... One by one they passed in front of me, teachers, friends, others, all those I'd been afraid of, all those I once could have laughed at, all those I'd lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs.

Auschwitz

For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother's hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister's fair hair ... and I didn't know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I'm condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

I glanced at my father. How he'd changed! ... The night was gone. So much had happened within such a few hours that I'd lost all sense of time. When had we left our houses? And the ghetto? And the train? Was it only a week? One night — one single night?

Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? ... But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. The only time they experience joy is when the Americans bomb the camp. "[W]e were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life."
   In January 1945, with the Soviet army approaching, the Germans decide to flee the camp, taking around 60,000 inmates, mostly Jews, to camps in Germany, on what becomes known as the death marches, shooting anyone too weak to continue. Eliezer and Shlomo march to Gleiwitz to be put on a freight train to Buchenwald, near Weimar.

An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering.
Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who couldn't keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they didn't deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.
Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.

Taking rest in a shed after marching 50 miles, Rabbi Eliahou asks if anyone has seen his son. They had stuck together for three years, "always near each other, for suffering, for blows, for the ration of bread, for prayer," but the rabbi lost sight of him in the crowd and is now scratching through the snow looking for his son's corpse. "I hadn't any strength left for running. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know." Wiesel doesn't tell Rabbi Eliahou that the son had noticed the rabbi limping, and had run faster, letting the distance between them grow.

A terrible thought loomed up in my mind: he'd wanted to get rid of his weak father! ... [He] had sought this separation in order to get rid of the burden, to free himself from an encumbrance ... And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done.

The inmates march as far as Gleiwitz, where they spend two days and nights locked inside cramped barracks without food, water, or heat, literally sleeping on top of one another, so that every morning the living wake up on top of corpses. Then there's more marching to the train station and onto a cattle wagon with no roof, and no room to sit or lie down until the other inmates make space by throwing the dead onto the tracks. They travel for ten days and nights, still with no food, and with only the snow falling on them for water. Of the 100 Jews in Wiesel's wagon, 12 survive the journey.

I woke from my apathy just at the moment when two men came up to my father. I threw myself on top of his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hand, crying:
Father! Father! Wake up. They're trying to throw you out of the carriage ...
His body remained inert ...
I set to work to slap him as hard as I could. After a moment, my father's eyelids moved slightly over his glazed eyes. He was breathing weakly.
You see, I cried.
The two men moved away.

Buchenwald

The Germans are waiting for the new inmates with loudhailers and orders to head straight for a hot bath. Wiesel is desperate for the heat of the water, but his father sinks into the snow, unable to move.

I could have wept with rage. Having lived through so much, suffered so much, could I leave my father to die now? Now, when we could have a good hot bath and lie down? ... He had become like a child, weak, timid, vulnerable ... I showed him the corpses all around him; they too had wanted to rest here ... I yelled against the wind ... I felt I wasn't arguing with him, but with death itself, with the death he'd already chosen.

An alert sounds, the camp lights goes out, and Eliezer, exhausted, follows the crowd to the barracks, leaving his father behind. He wakes at dawn on a wooden bunk, remembering that he's a father, and goes in search of him.

But at that same moment this thought came into my mind. Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever. Begging for water one night from his bunk, where he's lain for a week, Shlomo is beaten by an SS officer on the head with a truncheon for making too much noise. Eliezer lies in the bunk above and does nothing.

I didn't move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also receiving a blow. Then my father made a rattling noise and it was my name: Eliezer.

In the morning, January 29, 1945, Eliezer finds another invalid lying in his father's place. The Kapos had come before dawn and taken him to the crematorium, possibly still alive.

His last word was my name. A summons, to which I didn't respond.

I didn't weep, and it pained me that I couldn't weep. But I'd no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I've searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like — free at last!

Writing and publishing Night

From Buchenwald, Wiesel wanted to go to Palestine, but was prevented by British immigration restrictions. Refusing to return to Sighet, he was sent instead to the Oeuvre au Secours aux Enfants (Children's Rescue Service) with 400 other orphans, first to Belgium, then to Normandy, where he learned that his two older sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, had survived.
   From 1947–50, he studied the Talmud, and later philosophy and literature, at the Sorbonne, attending lectures by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber. To supplement his $16 a week stipend, he taught Hebrew, and worked as a translator for the militant Yiddish weekly Zion in Kamf, which eased him into a career in journalism.
   It was in 1954, on board a ship to Brazil, where he'd an assignment to cover Christian missionary activity in poor Jewish communities, that he said he started to write. "I wrote feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading. I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival ... My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the tenth anniversary of my liberation ... The pages piled up on my bed. I slept fitfully, never participating in the ship's activities, constantly pounding away on my little portable, oblivious of my fellow passengers ..."
   By the end of the journey, Wiesel had an 862-page manuscript that he called Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). On the ship, he was introduced by friends to Mark Turkov, a publisher of Yiddish texts, and he writes in his memoir that he gave Turkov the only copy of his precious manuscript. It was published as a 245-page volume the same year in Buenos Aires, the 117th book in a series of Yiddish memoirs of Europe and the war, called Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry). Whereas the other books in the series were testimonials to the victims, Ruth Wisse writes in The Modern Jewish Canon that Night stood out as a "highly selective and isolating literary narrative" influenced by Wiesel's reading of the French existentialists.

Wiesel writes in his memoir that he translated Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, and sent Mauriac the new manuscript within a year. Even with Mauriac's connections, no publisher could be found at first. They said it was too morbid, that no one would read it. "Nobody wants to hear these stories," they told Wiesel.
   In 1960, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang — who "believed in literature as others believe in God"— agreed to pay a $100 pro-forma advance, and published it in the U.S. in September that year as Night. It sold just 1,046 copies over the next 18 months, but attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with literary figures like Saul Bellow. "The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies," Wiesel said in an interview. "And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print." by March 2006, it had sold six million copies there, and had been translated into 30 languages. As of February 13, 2006, Night was no. 1 in The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction.

Memoir or novel

Scholars and reviewers have been unsure which literary genre Night belongs to. In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel explicitly says, "Night isn't a novel," calling it his "deposition," and writes that he "object[s] angrily" if someone implies it's a work of fiction.
   Nevertheless, reviewers have had difficulty approaching Night as a historical work or eyewitness account. Gary Weissman of East Carolina University writes in Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust that Night has been called a "novel/autobiography," an "autobiographical novel," a "non-fictional novel," a "semi-fictional memoir," a "fictional-autobiographical novel," a "fictionalized autobiographical memoir," and a "memoir-novel." François Mauriac wrote in the foreword to the first French edition that Night is "different, distinct, unique ... a book to which no other could be compared." When the first American edition was published, A. Alverez wrote in Commentary that it was "almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism."
   Ruth Franklin argues that the book's impact stems from its construction, which she calls "exquisite." Its language is plain, but "every sentence feels weighted and deliberate, every episode carefully chosen and delineated. It is also shockingly brief; it can be read in an hour, and carried in a pocket. One has the sense of merciless experience mercilessly distilled to its essence ... To read it's to lose one's own innocence about the Holocaust all over again." and complained bitterly about how quickly the world had forgotten the Holocaust. "Today, Germany is a sovereign state. The German army has been resuscitated ... War criminals stroll through the streets of Hamburg and Munich ... [T]here are anti-Semites in Germany, France, and even the United States who tell the world that the 'story' of six million assassinated Jews is nothing but a hoax ..."
   In preparation for publication in France, Wiesel and his publisher pruned everything that wasn't entirely necessary, and Franklin writes that it was a work of art that emerged, rather than a faithful narrative. Seidman told the Jewish Daily Forward that, in re-writing, rather than simply translating Un di Velt Hot Geshvign for publication in France, Wiesel had replaced an "angry survivor" who regards "testimony as a refutation of what the Nazis did to the Jews," with one who is "haunted by death, whose primary complaint is directed against God, not the world, [or] the Nazis."
   Wiesel has implied in interviews that it was his May 1955 meeting with Mauriac that first propelled him to break his vow of silence. In an interview published by the American Academy of Achievement, he said: "[Mauriac] took me to the elevator and embraced me. And that year, the tenth year, I began writing my narrative. After it was translated from Yiddish into French, I sent it to him. We were very, very close friends until his death. That made me not publish, but write." Mark Turkov, the publisher in Argentina, had been given the Yiddish manuscript in 1954 — one year before Wiesel's meeting with Mauriac. Seidman writes that "[t]hese confusing and possibly contradictory reports on the various versions of Night have generated a chain of similarly confusing critical comments."

Truth and memory

Ruth Franklin writes that Night's "resuscitation" by Oprah Winfrey came at a difficult time for the genre of memoir, after a previous Oprah's Book Club author, James Frey, was found to have fabricated parts of his autobiography, A Million Little Pieces. She argues that Winfrey's endorsement of Wiesel's work was a "canny move," perhaps designed to restore the book club's credibility with a book regarded as "beyond criticism."

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