Wiesel’s Memories of His Life during the Holocaust

Night (1958/1982): Wiesel’s Memories of His Life during the Holocaust

            Ten years after his liberation from Buchenwald, Wiesel (1958/1982) wrote of his perceptions at the time prior to and during his fifteenth year, a year spent with his father at concentration camps during the Holocaust.  Except when he uses terms such as “for all eternity,” referring to losing his desire to live after seeing the faces of burning children (p. 32) or “ashamed forever” (p. 101) toward the end, after “a moment” of wishing not to find his father so he could worry only about his own survival (one hopes that eventually he recognized that he was guilty only of being human), Wiesel did not reveal retrospective re-interpretations that he may or may not have made.  Thus, when considering Wiesel’s relationship with his father, for the most part, we are combining the remembered perceptions of a 15-year-old boy with interpretations of these perceptions Wiesel may or may not share.  The interpretation of their relationship that is the theme of this paper, as supported below, is that not only was Elie Wiesel’s father mainly a source of strength to him but that becoming such a source of strength was an act of heroism on the part of a man who had never even considered what it would be like to assume sole responsibility for one of his children.

            In the small Hungarian village of his birth, Elie and his family were members of a typical Orthodox Jewish community, where both by tradition and Judaic law, matters of home and childrearing were the domain of women, while the affairs of the larger community were the concerns of men.  The exception was in decisions regarding the religious education of sons (indeed, Judaic law forbade women from even reading the sacred Jewish texts).  While it might be expected that children would rebel against the Orthodoxy of their fathers, in the Wiesel family, Elie’s convictions, at the age of 12 in 1941, were stronger than his father’s – not only did he “believe profoundly,” (p. 1) but he wanted to progress more rapidly than proscribed by the tradition endorsed by his father. (Elie came to reject belief in a “just” god, and, whatever his father might have believed prior to the Holocaust, Elie implied his father shared his belief, when he said of him after Rosh Hashanah [the start of the Jewish New Year] at the concentration camp, without words passing between them, “We had never understood one and other so clearly,” p. 65.) Other than in matters involving religious education, Elie knew his father mainly by the high regard in which he was held by the larger Jewish community.

            At that time, if one listened, one could hear the rumblings of Nazism that would bring on a time unique, even in the bloodshed covering the pages of recorded world history, in the unrelenting cruelty and brutality on the part of members of one group towards members of another.  Although anti-Semitism had been (and is) a reality in the lives of the Jews, it is understandable that reports of the unprecedented evil that was to occur were dismissed.  Nor was it surprising that younger people, less set in their convictions of what was and wasn’t possible, were quicker than their elders to recognize the reality of Nazism.  By the Spring of 1944, when Elie was 15, he suggested that his family emigrate to Palestine while it was still possible, and after the Jews of the town were forced into a ghetto and deportation had begun, he urged his father to accept the offer of their prior gentile servant to provide them with safety in her home in another village.  Although his father did not oppose Elie and two of his sisters leaving, he thought it best that he, his wife, and the youngest child stay.  In what turned out to be a futile attempt to avoid the family being separated, Elie and his sisters also remained.

            Despite the consequences (admittedly, known only in retrospect) of Elie’s father’s refusal to attempt escaping, he already was beginning to lose the only persona he had ever learned, the composed, articulate spokesperson for the larger community.  Despite acting as the strong intermediary who had to inform those in the community of alarming information obtained from those outside of the Jewish community, from his “broken voice,” it was apparent that he did not himself believe that perhaps deportation meant only that they were being sent “to work in the brick factories” (p. 11).

            Less than a week later, along with the others left in the ghetto, the Wiesels were taken to Auschwitz, and with two sentences – “Men to the left! Women to the right!” (p. 27) – a new relationship began when Elie’s father then took his hand and Elie’s only thought was “not to lose him” (p. 27).  Elie’s thought that his father “did not want to see the burning of his son” (p. 30) certainly would have been correct, but was that really why he said in a “terribly sad” voice that it was “a shame that you couldn’t have gone with your mother” (p. 30)?  I think instead that he recognized the loving relationship Elie had had with his mother and doubted his own ability, at the age of 50, to learn how to provide for the emotional well-being of his son.

Jews generally have not valued excelling at physical activities, and Elie’s father, at 50, must have known that his own chances of survival through being useful in performing heavy physical labor were poor and, were it not for Elie, suicide (not unusual, especially among older prisoners) might be a very reasonable decision.  Perhaps the most poignant scene in the book is towards the end, when the prisoners at last were allowed to rest after marching for hours in the snow in the freezing cold, more than a few succumbed to the temptation to lie down, letting their bodies adapt to the cold and thus dying peacefully. At first, all that stopped Elie from doing the same was concern about leaving his father alone (p. 82), yet when at last he “had neither the will nor the strength to get up” (p.84), it was his father who forced him to continue until they found shelter.

Elie and his father provided each other with support.  The only scenes even approaching humor in this relentlessly horrifying autobiography were when Elie tried to teach his father to walk in the military manner required to avoid catching the attention of the SS in charge and when Elie, after his father was called to the side of those “selected” for extermination, rushed to join him, causing so much commotion that several, including Elie’s father, were able to escape the “selection” side.  For both Elie and his father, feeling the other needed support, in effect, provided support in their own efforts to survive.  But Elie himself recognized that “something within me revolted against…death” (p. 85), a perfectly understandable reaction at the age of 15.  An indication of the importance of his father to his own survival was that after his father’s death, his “life…no longer mattered…nothing could touch me any more” (p. 107).

But were it not for Elie, would his father have any reason to hold on, probably suspecting the result would be dying slowly, painfully, and pathetically?  There are different kinds of heroes.  When Frankl (1975), an inmate at several different concentration camps when a young psychiatrist, wrote that “the best of us did not return” (p. 7),  he was referring to those who lost their lives while engaged in risky activities such as smuggling information to those in the Resistance outside of the camps.  There also are heroes in their personal lives, and how can one fail to consider heroic a person who creates in himself a loving, protective father when called upon to do so during a time of evil on a scale unprecedented in human history?

References

Frankl, V. E. (1975).  Man’s search for meaning.  New York:  Pocket Books.

Wiesel, E. (1958/1982).  Night.  (S. Rodway, Trans.).  New York: Bantam Books.