No one should need an excuse to re-read a book as powerful as Night, but if I needed one, the new(er) translation by the author’s wife provided it. Everything that needs to be said about this book has been said, I suppose, many times over. In its brief, straightforward narrative it captures not just the horror of the attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews, but the destruction that was wrought even in the souls of survivors. Amid all the other losses, including members of his family, the loss that persists through the book, is the narrator-author’s loss of faith, the loss of God. The one thing that might have helped make sense of the grotesque insanity was gone, and with it, a large portion of the previously pious young victim’s self and soul. Remarkably (particularly given how pious the narrator was before being herded in cattle cars with so many others to Auschwitz), the complete loss of a sense of God’s justice did not happen over the course of a long incarceration as he struggled to find meaning in the light of faith. The change was immediate, everything was lost in a day, so brutal, so thorough, was the Nazi violation. How could a just God let this happen?
There are so many memorable scenes in this short book: the journey in the cramped cattle cars; the arrival at the camp; the sight, sound, and ash of the crematorium; the hanging of a child; the crusts of bread; the forced march when the camp was abandoned at war’s end; the gratuitous murders even in a place where gratuitous murder was the organizing principle. And there are so many painful moments, most having to do with loss: the loss of God, the loss of identity, the loss of friends and family, in the end the loss of his father, too, who was his mainstay through most of the ordeal. But there are also moments of remembering that humanity must be preserved. As the camp was being evacuated, the prisoners stopped long enough to clean their prison camp. Why? To let the liberating army know “that here lived men and not pigs.” I was reminded of Italian chemist Primo Levi’s account of his imprisonment in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, in which he describes the ex-army sergeant who washed daily, even though the water was dirty and he had only his soiled clothes to dry himself with. But he did it, and encouraged others to do the same, for the sake of dignity more than cleanliness, to remain human and to prevent the machine of war, imprisonment, and dehumanization from turning prisoners into beasts, as its masters wished it to do.
This book is a ringing call to remember, and to resist injustice, ignorance, and apathy. As Wiesel said in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 (reprinted at the end of this book): “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
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