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| Elie Wiesel September 30 1928 – 2 July 2016 |
February 2005
I just read the book "Night" by Elie Wiesel. It is a tiny book that does not look like much and the old dog eared Bookcrossing version that I read could easily be overlooked in a second hand bookstore.
For what it lacks in size and appearance it more than makes up for with content.
It was a very intense read for me. The very matter-of-fact way in which the horrors of the Holocaust are described turned my blood cold.
It makes it possible to understand (to some degree) why people didn't see it coming, why they didn't believe the warnings of people that had heard things about what was going on in the concentration camps. The horrors were to big to even begin to comprehend. The book explains how ordinary the horrible things he and his family went through seem when they are part of your day-to-day life. Things get worse step by step. It starts with the German invasion,then Jewish people start to disappear, then the formation of the Ghetto and finally deportation. You accept each step because of hoping that by doing it you prevent worse. Survival, every day was about survival for you and your family, in the author's case his father.
Most of the story is written in a very unemotional way, the events are described from a distance.
One scene is very emotional though, very tragic: the death of Elie Wiesel's father in Buchenwald.
I was moved, deeply moved by this book.
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
By pure coincidence I finished reading the book last week, January the 27th 2005. On the evening news I saw the item about Holocaust Memorial Day. The 60th anniversary of the liberation of the extermination and concentration camps, 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. They mentioned Elie Wiesel as a survivor of the Holocaust and as the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.
I'll close with two quotes from the Nobel Acceptance Speech delivered by Elie Wiesel in Oslo on December 10, 1986
"I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember he asked his father: “Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?”
And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
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There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr. – one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death.
As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.
Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.
