Night Elie Wiesel Holocaust Testimony Analysis

Night by Elie Wiesel is a book that should not have to exist—and yet it must. On one hand, it is unthinkable that the atrocities it chronicles are true. On the other hand, it is equally unthinkable that they might be forgotten by future generations. It is imperative that we have first-hand accounts of the Holocaust like Wiesel’s to bear witness to the fact that such inhumanity occurred in the past century, so it may never occur again. Finally, Night is also written as a way for Wiesel to reclaim his own humanity, after being dehumanized by his captors.

Wiesel, over the course of the novel, witnesses horrific crimes. Within the first pages of the short novel, Wiesel’s mother and sister are torn away from him. He never sees them again. By the end of the novel, he will also lose his father. In his introduction, Wiesel is adamant that the fact he survived was not due to his goodness, or tenacity. It was pure luck. “If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself?” (Wiesel 10-11). Wiesel describes Night as a way to struggle to give meaning to his life and death, and the lives and deaths of those who were not fortunate enough to survive, including other family members and members of his community. The book is not hopeful at the end, but Wiesel seems to have written it in a spirit of hope.

The fact that Wiesel wishes to make it very clear that many good people were not spared is evident in his portrayal of life at the camp, where people are struggling and squabbling over crumbs, simply to make it to the next day. First, the inmates of the camp are stripped of the physical trappings that make them human. They must bargain for the simplest of things, like having butter on their bread or even keeping their shoes: “He liked my shoes; I would not let him have them. Later, they were taken from me anyway. In exchange for nothing, that time” (Wiesel 48). Then, as Wiesel witnesses more and more horrors, he begins to lose his sense of faith and belief in humanity.

Despite the sometimes-unremitting bleakness of the book, Night is still a gift to readers. First, it is testimony of the ability of a human being to survive under the worst possible conditions. Even if Wiesel says that he was not spared for any particular reason, the fact he was able to take his experience and put it into art, to enable both himself and others to better understand what transpired is a gift. Also, the book is able to personalize the Holocaust in a way that history books cannot.

Perhaps what is most compelling about Night from a reader’s perspective is the extent to which it highlights how dehumanizing it was to survive the Holocaust from a psychological as well as physical perspective. “I spent my days in total idleness. With only one desire: to eat. I no longer thought of my father, or my mother. From time to time, I would dream. But only about soup, an extra ration of soup” (Wiesel 113). After being hungry for so long, Wiesel did not have the cognitive or physical energy to think about anything other than eating. As horrible as it is to see photographs from this period of camp survivors, the complete desolation Wiesel felt is in its own way just as awful. He seems to have been spiritually starving as well as physically starving.

The journey Wiesel takes over the course of Night is an extraordinary one, not simply physically from the ghetto to the camps, to finally being liberated, but also internally. He begins the story as a pious yeshiva student, even though he has already experienced discrimination and ostracization. Gradually, he begins to lose his faith in God and humanity as he witnesses the unthinkable. The end of the book is presented almost anticlimactically—the camp is liberated, but shortly beforehand, all of its inhabitants feared that they would be slaughtered by the Germans, because they knew the Germans were losing the war. Again, time and time again, Wiesel stresses that he survived, not so much by the grace of God or fortitude, but because of luck and the fact that was all he knew he could do—to go on.

Wiesel also deliberately ends his book, not on a positive note, but on a very haunting one, as he looks at himself for the first time since the ghetto, and thinks that he looks like a corpse. There will be a long time, he implies, before he can feel alive again. The rest of this journey is chronicled in Wiesel’s life and other words, as an activist for human rights, grounded in his experiences. However, he does not use rose-colored glasses to look back at his time in the camps, and sugar-coat them, pretending that he showed more fortitude or less fear than he did. There are almost no signs of goodness throughout the book, except for the occasional words of assistance, like urging him to eat when he could, that enabled him to live until the very end.