Recognizing and Fighting Evil in Elie Wiesel's Night
Night by Elie Wiesel
Though it is called a novel, Night (Wiesel 1982) is actually a memoir about Wiesel's experiences as a young, devout Jewish boy who is forced by World War II Nazis into a concentration camp, along with his family. The main character, Eliezer, is actually Wiesel, and through his descriptions and thoughts about his life before, during and after the concentration camps, Wiesel illustrates ways that people may recognize evil and fight it by: listening to warnings, taking a side and acting; paying attention to evil as it tightens its grip on us; acting against the oppressor rather than the oppressed; remembering the terrible results of evil so we can fight it in the future.
Elie Wiesel was a man who experienced and managed to describe indescribable evil at the hand of the Nazis. In his novel, Night, Wiesel actually tells true experiences of evil in a way that gives pointers for recognizing and fighting evil. According to Wiesel: we should listen to people who have experienced evil and warn us about it, then take a side and act; we should not be naïve and should pay attention and understand when evil is tightening its grip on us; when we are oppressed, we should turn on the oppressor rather than turning on each other; we must remember the horrors imposed upon humanity by evil. Through these ideas, which are outlined here in no particular order of importance, Wiesel is trying to make us better able to recognize and fight evil.
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Had she lived, Anne Frank would have celebrated her eighty-first birthday in the summer of 2010. One can speculate endlessly on the woman she might have become. Perhaps, like Elie Wiesel, she would have made it her…