Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928,
in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania that was then part of Romania but
became part of Hungary in 1940. Wiesel’s
Orthodox Jewish family was highly observant of Jewish tradition. His
father, Shlomo, a shopkeeper, was very involved with the Jewish
community, which was confined to the Jewish section of town, called
the shtetl. As a child and teenager, Wiesel distinguished himself
in the study of traditional Jewish texts: the Torah (the first five
books of the Old Testament), the Talmud (codified oral law), and
even—unusual for someone so young—the mystical texts of the Cabbala.
Until 1944, the Jews of Hungary
were relatively unaffected by the catastrophe that was destroying
the Jewish communities in other parts of Europe. The leader of the German National
Socialist (Nazi) party, Adolf Hitler, came to power in 1933,
behind campaign rhetoric that blamed the Jews for Germany’s depression
after World War I. Germany embraced Hitler’s
argument for the superiority of the Nordic peoples, which he (mistakenly)
called the Aryan race. The country soon implemented a set of laws—including
the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935—designed
to dehumanize German Jews and subject them to violence and prejudice.
As World War II progressed, Hitler
and his counselors developed the “Final Solution” to the so-called
Jewish Question—a program of systematic extermination of Europe’s
Jews. By the time the Allies defeated Germany in 1945,
the Final Solution had resulted in the greatest act of genocide
known to the world. Six million European Jews had been murdered,
along with millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, and others whom the
Nazis considered undesirable. The greatest numbers of victims were
killed in concentration camps, in which Jews—and other enemies of
Germany—were gathered, imprisoned, forced into labor, and, when
they could no longer be of use to their captors, annihilated. In
addition to the slaughter at the camps, millions of soldiers were
killed in battle. By the end of World War II, more
than thirty-five million people had died, over half of them civilians.
While anti-Jewish legislation was a common phenomenon
in Hungary, the Holocaust itself did not reach Hungary until 1944.
In March of 1944, however, the German army
occupied Hungary, installing a puppet government (a regime that
depends not on the support of its citizenry but on the support of
a foreign government) under Nazi control. Adolf Eichmann, the executioner
of the Final Solution, came to Hungary to oversee personally the
destruction of Hungary’s Jews. The Nazis operated with remarkable
speed: in the spring of 1944, the Hungarian
Jewish community, the only remaining large Jewish community in continental
Europe, was deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland.
Eventually, the Nazis murdered 560,000 Hungarian
Jews, the overwhelming majority of the prewar Jewish population
in Hungary. In Wiesel’s native Sighet, the disaster was even worse:
of the 15,000 Jews in prewar Sighet, only
about fifty families survived the Holocaust. In May of 1944, when
Wiesel was fifteen, his family and many inhabitants of the Sighet
shtetl were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
The largest and deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of
more than 1,300,000 Jewish deaths. Wiesel’s
father, mother, and little sister all died in the Holocaust. Wiesel
himself survived and emigrated to France.
After observing a ten-year vow of silence about the Holocaust, in 1956 Wiesel
published Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (Yiddish for And the
World Remained Silent), an 800-page
account of his life during the Holocaust. In 1958, he condensed
his work and translated it from its original Yiddish into French,
publishing it under the title La Nuit. The work
was translated into English and published in 1960 as Night. Some
scholars have argued that significant differences exist between Un
di Velt Hot Geshvign and the subsequent French/English
publications, chiefly that in the Yiddish text, Wiesel expressed
more anger toward the Nazis and adopted a more vengeful tone.
Although publishers were initially hesitant to embrace Night, believing
that audiences would not be interested in such pessimistic subject
matter, the memoir now stands as one of the most widely read and
taught accounts of the Holocaust. From a literary point of view,
it opened the way for many other stories and memoirs published in
the second half of the twentieth century. In 1963,
Wiesel became an American citizen; he now lives in New York City.
Night as a literary work
While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony
about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely
speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated
by a boy named Eliezer who represents Wiesel, but details differentiate
the character Eliezer from the real-life Wiesel. For instance, Eliezer
wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Wiesel wounded
his knee.
Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because
he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost
impossibly painful for a survivor to write about his Holocaust experience, and
the mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel to distance himself somewhat
from the experience, to look in from the outside. Also, Wiesel is
interested in documenting emotional truth as well as the historical
truth about physical events. Night is the story
of a boy who survives the concentration camps, but it also traces
Eliezer’s emotional journey from a believing Orthodox Jewish boy
to a profoundly disenchanted young man who questions the existence of God
and, by extension, the humanity of man. Wiesel terms Night a “deposition”—an
exact rendering of the facts as they occurred to him. But Night is
neither a record of facts nor an impartial document. Instead,
it is an attempt to re-create the thoughts and experiences that
Wiesel had as a teenage concentration camp prisoner.
Because Night’s protagonist closely resembles
its author, it may be considered more of a memoir than a novel.
Nevertheless, since Wiesel employs various literary devices to make
his story effective, it is important to examine how his techniques
are different from those used in a novel. One important difference
is that a novel typically concerns itself with creating a convincing
fictional story, explaining the causes and effects of everything
that occurs within its fictional world, tying up loose ends, and
fleshing out all of its characters. Night, however,
is concerned solely with Wiesel’s personal experience. Whatever
events lie outside the narrator’s direct observation vanish from
the work’s perspective. After Eliezer is separated from his mother
and sister, for example, he never speaks about them again, and we
never learn their fate. Night also has other literary
elements. The narrator’s chance encounter in the Métro with a French woman
he had known while working in the concentration camps is an encounter
that usually occurs in fiction. And carefully chosen poetic language
reinforces detail throughout the work. Night’s literary
qualities, particularly the limited perspective of a first-person
narrator, give us a subjective, deeply personal impression of the horrors
of the Holocaust.
