Recently, something pushed me to revisiting a book I had read for class while I was in high school. The book, Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel’s Night, gives a straight forward account of the author’s trip as a 15 year-old Orthodox Jew in a small village in Transylvania to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Night seems to be in a genre entirely to itself; Wiesel claims it’s a deposition of unvarnished truth, others have difficulty believing that such a young boy could recall every conversation and detail under the weight of such an unbearable pain. To me, the argument is mute. With what is known about the Holocaust, Wiesel’s story could be true, and that should be enough to haunt even the most callous among us.
Written with devastating simplicity, the short book never gives you even a moment to breathe. By the time I reached the end of it, sitting on my couch at 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon, I slammed the book down to the ground in anger and cried into the couch pillows. I don’t remember the last time – if ever – a book has ever had this effect on me.
As well as being an exposed, raw account of what may go down as the darkest moment humanity has ever seen, the book touches poignantly on the problem of evil. Namely, how can a just, loving, merciful God exist in the face of such calamity and calculated destruction? How could Elie, a previously pious Jew, continue worshiping an all-powerful, all-loving God that lets his mother and sister go up in smoke? Who lets another boy kill his own father over a scrap of bread, only then to be beaten to death himself for the same scrap? Here’s a clue: he can’t, and he has no qualms about admitting and lamenting his loss of faith. Really, how could anyone possibly blame him? Read the story, sit with this question, put yourself into Elie’s shoes, and just see how you might answer this question.
So what does such a strong, visceral reaction to a book mean for me? Five minutes of tears and then personal absolution? I sure hope not. Saying “never again” and then going about my day-to-day life? How sad that would be. Honestly, I’m not yet sure what my response should be. But the final sentences of the book, said after U.S. liberation, seal a lasting impression:
“I wanted to see myself in the mirror. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.
The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.”
