Elie Wiesel and \"Night\" Despite

Elie Wiesel and "Night"

Despite technological advances, the 20th century may go down in history as one of the most bloody and inhumane of all human history. This being the case, there are bright and shining examples of human dignity, compassion, and perserverence in the face of adversity that validate what it means to be human and provides evidence that, as a species, we are capable of great beauty as well as great horror. One such example of this is the 1958 publication of Night by Elie Wiesel. The book is an emotional account of Wiesel's experiences with his father in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944-45. It is a short book, originally written in the author's native Hebrew and then translated into English. As a narrative it is a personal history of the devastation of the soul, the death of God, and the disgust Wiesel felt towards humanity as a teenager being forced to view such excesses. In this universe, all morality is reverse, all semblance of civilization stripped away, and as one of the Guards tells him, "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone" (Wiesel, 1982, 105).

Wiesel's chronical, published over a decade after his liberation, has been criticzed as being tailored and not a memoir. However, since the 1960s Wiesel has been a tireless devotee towards world peace and ensuring that the injustices of the Nazi era do not happen again. And, despite any criticism, Wiesel won the coveted Nobel Peace Prize in 1986; the Nobel Committee calling Wiesel's works the message of "peace, atonement and human dignity."

The Nobel Peace Prize is annually awared to the person who "shall have done the most or the best work for his fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses" (Nobel, 2010). The prize is not awarded every year, since 1901 there have been 19 years in which it was determined that no candidate fit the criteria. However, in 1986 Wiesel received the prize because of his continual work towards reminding humanity that violence, repression and racism have no place in the modern world. Since 1958, and the publication of Night, Wiesel continued to write, lecture, and advocate a continual "message of peace, atonement and human dignity…. His message is based on his own personal experience of total humiliation…. His commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races" (Norwrgian Nobel Committee, 1986).