How Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, resists the erasure of memory

“I shall never forgive myself. Nor shall I ever forgive the world for having pushed me against the wall, for having turned me into a stranger, for having awakened in me the basest, most primitive instincts. His last word had been my name. A summons. And I had not responded,” Wiesel (1928-2016) wrote in the original Yiddish draft of his memoir, Night, based on his deeply personal experiences as a captive, along with his father, in the much-feared Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War.

Translated into 30 languages, including French and English, Night (1956) is the first book in a trilogy; its companion books include Dawn (1961) and Day (1962). Taken together, the memoirs mark Eliezer’s journey from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. “I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end — man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night,” he writes in Night, a story of survival, suffering, sentiment, strength, silence, helplessness and hope, and also the battle between memory and forgetfulness. Above everything else, this brilliantly executed narrative is about the immeasurable value of preserving memory for posterity.

A witness testifies

What makes Night an essential read for students of literature, journalists and chroniclers is its poignant message: documenting the ordeal even when such an exercise entails a cost. Another powerful message in the book concerns the lack of empathy in people, as they generally are not interested in conflicts in faraway lands. “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know,” Wiesel writes.

Wiesel wrote about 50 odd books, but Night was special. “If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one,” he wrote. The reason why the author attaches so much importance to his memoir is because he took the responsibility to never allow the world to forget the horrors of violence against the Jewish community in Nazi Germany.

“I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer—or my life, period— would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory,” he writes, telegraphing a message of moral obligation as a chronicler of the times. 

Bearing witness to how European fascism destroyed the lives of the Jews, Wiesel has done justice by narrating the story of betrayal and survival dispassionately. Raised in an Orthodox family in Sighet, Transylvania, he narrates how the greedy doctors drew sadistic pleasure by pulling gold teeth of the captives and how the Kapos mercilessly beat fellow Jews due to what Viktor E. Frankl — Austrian psychiatrist and another Holocaust survivor — described as a ‘delusion of reprieve’ in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946).

Tales of torture and humiliation

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time,” he writes in the Preface to the 2006 translation of Night by his wife Marion Wiesel, who translated most of his works.

Wiesel tells us about the daily struggles in the death camps and how the captives were tortured and humiliated. He also recounts how he was separated from his mother and sister, and how helplessly he watched his father succumb to dysentery. The German SS men beat his father to the pulp and Wiesel could offer no help. In a way, Wiesel was relieved when his father passed away at Auschwitz for he thought the death was a closure and his father would not have to face the insult anymore. In Night, he asks an important question: “Where was God at Auschwitz?”

Wiesel wrote the initial draft of Night in Yiddish language as Und di Velt Hot Geshvign” (And the World Remained Silent). In his belief, remaining silent in situations of injustice is akin to siding with the perpetrators of violence. At the time of writing the first version of the book, he was in Brazil on an assignment as a young journalist in his 20s.

‘A messenger to mankind’

Initially, the major publishers did not show interest in his manuscript. Several publishers rejected it. In Paris, Wiesel was advised to rewrite the book in French by then-renowned novelist and writer Francois Mauriac, but even then the manuscript faced rejection. Eventually, in 1958, the French version saw the light of day. The book was published in the English language in 1960, and it has sold an estimated 10 million copies since.

Wiesel won the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on December 10, 1986, almost three decades after the publication of this account of great essence. As an eyewitness to the Holocaust, Wiesel refused to remain silent. The Nobel Committee described him as a “messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and dignity.”

In his acceptance speech, Wiesel said, “There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and political persecution, writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right. Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free…..” He added: “As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame…”

In 2008, Wiesel’s memoir was removed from the New York Times best-seller list. The survey department of the NYT declared that Night was now a classic like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), an allegorical novel based on another story of betrayal — the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin during Russia’s Bolshevik revolution.