I first read this book a few years ago, when it was making a splash on Oprah’s book club (not that I follow Oprah’s book club, but I was in Chapters with a friend at the time who mentioned this book because everyone was talking about it and well, you know me, talk up a book to me and I’m there!)
Reading it a second time for January’s meeting of the Windsor Book Club didn’t lesson the horror of the novel any. Night is Wiesel’s true story account of his life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Although he and his family came late to the camps (in 1944, when German soldiers finally made their way to his family’s small village of Sighet in Transylvania), the story is no less harrowing or heartbreaking, and the atrocities experienced by himself, his father and others in the camp no less significant than stories of those who spent the entire war in the camps and survived to tell their tale in order that history would never repeat itself.
From the descriptions of the train journey from Sighet to Auschwitz, cramped together in cattle cars with little food and less water, where many Jews perished, to the daily life in the camps, Wiesel spares few details. What stands out for me, as a modern day reader with no firsthand experience of this time in history, is that Wiesel’s words ring with compassion. It is evident he writes his story because such horror to a people must be recorded and learned from, yet there is no anger in Wiesel for the people who perpetrated this crime. Instead what Wiesel struggles with is faith. He questions a God who would choose to allow this to happen to the “chosen” people. His very faith is shaken to the core, yet when he is finally liberated from the camps, he says:
“Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That’s all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread.
And when we were no longer hungry, not one of us thought of revenge.”
I am not a religious person. A spiritual person, yes, but I follow no organized religion, but to me, these few sentences from Wiesel are what religion and faith should be about and what Wiesel never fully puts into words, but rings clearly for me: forgiveness. It is this message, I think, that makes the book resonate with so many readers.
What my fellow book clubbers had to say:
It was a very small, intimate group at last night’s meeting, which made for some great discussion. We all to a one enjoyed reading Night, and for some, learned more about this period in history. When asked what the defining moment in the novel was for us, many talked about the relationship between father and son, and how basic survival outweighed family loyalty and what that must have been like for these sons, who chose life over saving their fathers. There is one rather harrowing scene in the book where
Elie’s sickly father is beaten to death in front of him, calling out to his son the entire time. Unable to go to his father, paralyzed with fear that he may be killed too, Elie remains still and silent, and afterwards feels relief over the death of his father, for the sickly man is no longer a burden to Elie. From our modern day, comfortable viewpoint, it is difficult to imagine being in Elie’s position and making that difficult choice. That utter destruction of man, turning him into a mere beast intent on nothing more than pure animalistic survival, is one of the things that truly make the Holocaust so incredibly horrific.
Till next time, happy reading.
L J
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