"I have more faith in Hitler than anyone else. He alone has kept his promises- all his promises, to the Jewish people."
I was on a bus to a friend's house when I finally finished Night. I know that this broke my "rule" of not reading it in public, but it was absolutely worth it to finish it where I did. After putting it away and taking several deep breaths, I caught the gaze of the woman sitting across from me. She gave me a sad little smile and made a comment about how difficult of a book it is to read, and that she understood how I was feeling.
I finished this book exactly a week after the Pittsburgh shooting. For those of you who may not know what the Pittsburgh shooting was, or maybe enough time has passed between then and the time that you are reading this that you have forgotten, a man ran into a synagogue on the morning of Saturday, October 27th, shouted, "All Jews must die!" and shot 18 patrons in attendance at the Shabbat service, killing 11 of them and injuring 7 others. The victims ranged in age from 54 to 97, with the eldest murder victim being a Holocaust survivor. Imagine surviving the Holocaust, only to be murdered by a man screaming that all Jews must die. I can't begin to fathom it.
When the woman across from me told me that she understood how I was feeling, while appreciative of her words, I found myself questioning the depth of her statement. Was she saying that merely because she, too, had read the book? Had she seen the gold star glowing around my neck? Even if she hadn't, was I giving off a vibe of some sort? Regardless of her reasoning, I was grateful to see a kind face while letting the book's effects wash over me.
As stated in Pt 1 of this review, the Holocaust is far from being unfamiliar to me, so much so that I was expecting not to cry when visiting Yad Vachem during my time in Israel over the summer.
I cried twice.
Night had a similar effect on me: I was expecting to not be tremendously surprised by much, and wasn't expecting it to be overwhelmingly graphic. Prior to reading the book, I looked at plenty of reviews. The reviews that I had read offered huge praise to the book and spoke of the difficulty that came with reading it. Thinking myself desensitized to the Holocaust and expecting to be surprised by nothing, I found myself pshaw-ing in derision at said reviews.
Night is, in my opinion, not a plot-driven book. It is more so character-driven, which is why I have so little description of the plot in this review: when something in the book happens, it takes the story in a new direction that I feel would only enter spoiler territory if I tried to describe them here. Personally, I tremendously prefer character-driven stories over plot-driven stories any day, and this was no exception. (This will be explored further in a future post, so stay on the lookout for that!) This may come as a surprise to some of you, my saying that Night is not plot-driven, given that most people consider it to be more so about the circumstances encountered by Elie Wiesel and the other characters rather than the characters themselves. However, I am of the opposite mind, as it was through the perception of Elie himself that we were able to witness the atrocity that surrounded him. He did not document the profound detail of each moment that passed him by, but rather how it had influence on the people with whom he shared the moments as well as several bouts of introspection. He would repeatedly note the changes that he had seen in the people that endured the hell with him, making this a tale more so of the people than the hell itself. For lack of a better word, it is far easier to describe an atrocity itself than it is to describe the impact that it has on the victims. My father doesn't cry at sad movies. Not at the sad parts, anyway. My father cries when he sees the reactions from the people in the movie. Those who react to the sad goings-on. He doesn't cry at the funeral scene itself, but rather when the mourners are shown. It is the reflection of the tragedy in them that demonstrates the true impact. It is not in the artifacts that we see the legacy that was left by the moments, but rather the moments that leave the legacy of the artifacts on the eyelids and in the eardrums of those who can't help but remember.
As in Yad Vachem, it was not the element of surprise that affected me when reading this book. It was the powerful imagery and my own imagination that reduced me to a tender ball of anguish. In Yad Vachem, the first time that I cried was when I stood just over a foot away from the transport vehicle of the Jewish people who were sent to the camps. What was this transport vehicle?
A cattle car. I had known that they were sent to the camps in cattle cars. I knew that that was just one of the multiple dehumanization tactics used by the Nazis, this method explicitly comparing the Jewish people to cattle. But seeing it in front of me made me think of the bodies that were crammed into it, the terror and uncertainty regarding what was to happen to them next filling each of them to the brim, and the two of my great-aunts who were part of that crowd. I found myself thinking of them and the absolute agony that the one survivor felt when leaving Auschwitz without her sister. The one who was murdered was 20 years old.
This cattle car was what brought me to tears the first time. I tried to hold in my sobs, being that I am not a particularly quiet crier, and, after soaking it in, averted my gaze and stared at the ground to avoid seeing other artifacts that would break my tear dam. A few steps away, on the ground, under a sheet of glass, was a massive pile of shoes.
The dam had broken, and out poured the flood. I tried my best to keep it in as to not disturb other patrons of the museum and stayed frozen in place, my hands covering my face in an attempt to suppress the sounds of the sobs, but to no avail. (Sending out a huge shoutout to former IDF soldier and my dear friend, Maya, for pulling me out of the museum to talk it out and help me through it!)
It was not the surprise that hit me in Yad Vachem. And it was not the surprise that hit me when reading Night.
It was the inescapability of the horrendous reality. The vivid description with which Elie Wiesel wrote conveyed such intense feelings of being trapped in a reality that is so far outside of his control that subsequently led to questioning and ultimately losing faith in a G-d he once believed in so fiercely created a fatalistic tidal wave that rocked my naïve little boat with every passing chapter. The cattle car represents being physically trapped in an enclosed space and being unable to escape the immediate situation itself, while also being trapped in the clutches of the Nazis and the questioning of what was to come next. The shoes represent being metaphorically being trapped in any situation, as, without their shoes, they were unable to run away and escape the horror. Even if they could run away, to where would they run? No matter where, they are unable to run away from the situation that put them in this horrid experience. To read Elie Wiesel's descriptions, I felt a suffocation that I had never experienced before. After Yad Vachem, I felt that there was no way mere words in a book could compare to seeing the artifacts in front of me. I was wrong.
In Yad Vachem, I had stood outside of the cattle car. In Night, I was squeezed and pressed up against other soulless bodies inside of it. In Yad Vachem, I stood behind the glass to the pile of shoes. In Night, I felt barefoot, naked, and frozen in horror.
I hope that this does not deter anyone from reading this masterpiece of a book, or from visiting the magnificent museum. I stand by what I said in the first part of this review: "If we do not learn about what happened, it can be said that it is all too easy to forget." Go to the museum. Read the book. Talk with survivors. Watch videos on the Internet.
And above all, learn.
Never forget. Never again.
Joyce Fienberg, 75 Richard Gottfried, 65 Rose Mallinger, 97 Jerry Rabinowitz, 66 Cecil Rosenthal, 59 David Rosenthal, 54 Bernice Simon, 84 Sylvan Simon, 87 Daniel Stein, 71 Melvin Wax, 88 Irving Younger, 69 May their memory be a blessing
Bibliography
Buncombe, A. (2018, October 29). Names of victims released as Trump accused of creating 'conflict'. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-latest-victims-names-robert-bowers-a8605376.html Wiesel, E. (2016, January 16). Night by Elie Wiesel. Retrieved November 16, 2018, from https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/265616-la-nuit
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