Wiesel's Night Is a Title

¶ … Wiesel's Night Night is a title that aptly reflects its message. In night, the obverse of day, all of life's normality is torpedoed. The son is made to look after the father; wanton murder is unleashed; God is concealed (as per the kabalistic statement that He is concealed at night); and people telling truths are shunted aside for desired fabrications. Just as at night reality is obliterated by obfuscation and surrealism, so was it the case in Wiesel's 'night'.

Eliezer, an adolescent scholar from a backwards Carpathian village, had spent his life in the Talmud and Yeshiva and was unaware of events in the outside world. He was aware that the Messiah would come one day, but was not expecting the Messiah in the form of the Germans.

The first glimpse that his life would change was in the form of Moshe the Beadle who, in 1942, escaping from a Polish-bound train, returned to Sighet and pounded the village with horrendous facts about Jews forced to dig their own pits and then shot alive; about babies thrown in the air as shooting targets; about Malka, a young girl, who took three days to die.

As happens during the night when sleep assumes a different form of reality, the people of his town refused to listen making Moshe, Night's first unheeded witness. He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has! they said. Or even: Poor fellow. He's gone mad. And as for Moshe, he wept (Night, pp. 4 -- 5.) Day became inverted into night. Reality became further more inverted, "The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear.

We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained…. -- it was an illusion" (Night, p. 9.) Wiesel relates how his rabbi, whom he, Eliezer, was formerly afraid of, was compelled to march through the street, his face shaved, his back bent "and there was I, on the pavement, unable to make a move." It was, Wiesel describes it, "like a page torn from some story book" (Night, pp.14-15).

Refusal to face reality was exemplified by another situation where, on their third night in the cattle car, a woman shrieks that she can see flames until she is beaten into silence by the others. These were nightmares that could occur only at night, but they came true in Auschwitz. Here, the very young, the mentally and physically handicapped, the crippled, the pregnant, and the very old were cremated in an observe inversion of day where normality decrees that it is precisely this most vulnerable human sector that is protected.

Shlomo, Eliezer's father, begins his physical decline indicating another inversion of reality. Normally, the father is supposed to take care of the son; here roles were reversed. The young man become the older man's caregiver and was resentful since he felt the other's existence threatening his own. In another inversion, kaddish, the Jewish prayer that is routinely said for the dead, was said by the living for themselves. In one scene, Eliezer watches a truck pull up and toss heaps of children, some of them alive, in a smoking pyre.

His father standing next to him says Kaddish for the children. 15-year-old Eliezer wants to electrocute himself on the barbed wire, and feels that his father is saying kaddish for both of them too. The episodes in Night were so horrific that it made normally decent people forsake their ethics due to necessity. Rabbi Eliyahu's son, who never forsook him during all those years, was forced to flee ahead, on a death march, leaving his father to grope for his supposed corpse in the snow.

Wiesel swore never to do the same thing to his father. Yet, when the Germans beat his father for being unable to move, and his father articulated his name with his last breath, Eliezer was too afraid to respond. Night does these things to you. It makes you paralyzed.

Most angst-provoking of all to the young Wiesel was his loss of faith in God, and this is the brunt of his book and the brunt of his theme throughout his life, no doubt intensified by his later philosophical studies under existentialist teachers such as Buber and Sartre. God was killed but, in another inversion (day into night), God was killed by those He created.

He, the alleged potent Being, had been made impotent by so-called impotent beings and was dying on the gallows along with a child so light in weight, that when hung, the boy died slowly and in agony: I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man (Night, p. 64.) Night is the umpteeth level of alone-ness. In the day, a friend can hug you, reach out to you, whilst another can physically touch you.

In the night there is only, and you alone: "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a Kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone" (p.23) Day had gone.

The optimistic naive dreams of the sheltered boy who had dreamt of a messiah was replaced by an unimaginable nightmare - by a long night; and the worst of it seemed to be that his constant succor and hope of the past -- 'the Rock of the Ages' had flitted away with the day and vanished in the smoke of the crematoriums. Wiesel's experiences changed him as they changed others in differential ways. As regards Wiesel, they transformed him from a naive protected youth into a cynical resilient man.

Important is it to note that the book itself -- true to its title -- is no such clear formulation of unvarnished day either. Originally written in Yiddish, it was translated into French and, to please an audience, stripped away to the extent that many called it art rather than truth. The original Yiddish was angry and savage, and elaborated far more. The French version, and, later, the American version, subdued that anger and directed itself to its peculiar audience (Seidman, 1996).