Summary
At the end of the summer of 1944,
the Jewish High Holidays arrive: Rosh Hashanah, the celebration
of the new year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Despite their
imprisonment and affliction, the Jews of Buna come together to celebrate
Rosh Hashanah, praying together and praising God’s name. On this
solemn Jewish holiday, Eliezer’s religious rebellion intensifies,
and he cannot find a reason to bless God in the midst of so much
suffering. Eliezer mocks the idea that the Jews are God’s chosen
people, deciding that they have only been chosen to be massacred.
He comes to believe that man is stronger than God, more resilient
and more forgiving. His denial of faith leaves him alone, or so
he believes, among the 10,000 Jewish celebrants
in Buna. Leaving the service, however, Eliezer finds his father,
and there is a moment of communion and understanding between them.
Searching his father’s face, Eliezer finds only despair. Eliezer
decides to eat on Yom Kippur, the day on which Jews traditionally
fast in order to atone for their sins.
Soon after the Jewish New Year, another selection is announced. Eliezer
has been separated from his father to work in the building unit.
He worries that his father will not pass the selection, and after several
days it turns out that Eliezer’s father is indeed one of those deemed
too weak to work: he will be executed. He brings Eliezer his knife
and spoon, his son’s only inheritance. Eliezer is then forced to leave,
never to see his father again.
When Eliezer returns from work, it seems to him that there
has been a miracle. A second selection occurred among the condemned, and
Eliezer’s father survived. Akiba Drumer, however, is not so lucky.
Having lost his faith, he loses his will to live and does not survive
the selection. Others are also beginning to lose their faith. Eliezer
tells of a devout rabbi who confesses that he can no longer believe
in God after what he has seen in the concentration camps.
With the arrival of winter, the prisoners begin to suffer
in the cold. Eliezer’s foot swells up, and he undergoes an operation.
While he is in the hospital recovering, the rumor of the approaching
Russian army gives him new hope. But the Germans decide to evacuate the
camp before the Russians can arrive. Thinking that the Jews in the
infirmary will be put to death prior to the evacuation, Eliezer and
his father choose to be evacuated with the others. After the war, Eliezer
learns that they made the wrong decision—those who remained in the
infirmary were freed by the Russians a few days later. With his
injured foot bleeding into the snow, Eliezer joins the rest of the
prisoners. At nightfall, in the middle of a snowstorm, they begin
their evacuation of Buna.
Analysis
In Jewish tradition, the High Holidays are the time of
divine judgment. According to the prayer book, Jews pass before
God on Rosh Hashanah like sheep before the shepherd, and God determines
who will live and who will die in the coming year. In the concentration camps,
Eliezer hints, a horrible reversal has taken place. Soon after Rosh
Hashanah, the SS (Nazi police) performs a
selection on the prisoners at Buna. All the prisoners pass before
Dr. Mengele, the notoriously cruel Nazi doctor, and he determines
who is condemned to death and who can go on living. The parallel
is clear and so is the message: the Nazis have placed themselves
in God’s role. Eliezer has decided that the Nazis’ actions mean
that God is not present in the concentration camps, and thus praying
to him is foolish.
The Nazis’ usurpation of God’s role is further emphasized
when an inmate tells Eliezer, “I’ve got more faith in Hitler than
in anyone else. He’s the only one who’s kept his promises . . .
to the Jewish people.” Akiba Drumer’s death makes it painfully clear
that humankind requires faith and hope to live. After losing his
faith, Drumer resigns himself to death. Eliezer promises to say
the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, on Drumer’s
behalf, but he forgets his promise. Eliezer’s loss of faith comes
to mean betrayal not just of God but also of his fellow human beings.
Wiesel seems to affirm that life without faith or hope of some kind
is empty. Yet, even in rejecting God, Eliezer and his fellow Jews
cannot erase God from their consciousness. Though he has supposedly
lost his faith in God, Akiba Drumer requests that Eliezer say the Kaddish on
his behalf; clearly religion still holds some power over him. Similarly,
in the third section, Eliezer, having rejected his faith in God
forever, still refers to God’s existence when making his oath never
to forget the Holocaust “even if I am condemned to live as long
as God Himself.” In the first volume of his autobiography, All
Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel speaks at far greater length
about his religious feelings after the Holocaust. “My anger rises
up within faith and not outside it,” he writes. “I had seen too
much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of
those who had suffered.” Wiesel, in his personal life, kept his
faith in God throughout the Holocaust. His narrator, Eliezer, seems
unable to reject the Jewish tradition and the Jewish God completely,
even though he declares his loss of faith.
