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In characterizing the focus of his work, Wiesel is perhaps his most dogged critic. Unwilling to laud himself as a touchstone of modern documentary journalism and a prime mover in the establishment of Holocaust lore as a unique wing of twentieth-century literature, he thinks of himself as a modest witness rather than moralist, theologian, or sage. In One Generation After, he accounts for his method and purpose: "I write in order to understand as much as to be understood." The most prominent of his early writings—the impressionistic trilogy composed of Night, Dawn (1961), and The Accident (1962)—reports Third Reich savagery with a controlled passion. Fifteen years after the fall of concentration camps, he battled repeated rejections before publishing in 1960 with Hill & Wang the first English version of the trio, translated by Stella Rodway.
In the canon of war literature, Night holds a unique position among works that differentiate between the challenge to the warrior and the sufferings of the noncombatant. A terse, merciless testimonial, the book serves as an austere reflection on war that has been characterized as "pure as a police report." Some analysts view the work as allegory in its depiction of the devastating effect of evil on innocence; critic Lawrence Cunningham labels the work a "thanatography."
Although Night earned the author a pro forma advance of only $100 and sold only 1,046 copies its first eighteen months, three and a half decades later, Night has achieved the status of a nonfiction classic. Alongside Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place, and Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List, Wiesel's memoir forms one of the cornerstones of Holocaust reportage.
In the decade following Wiesel's introduction of a verboten topic, few people—even outraged Jews—clamored to hear his grisly, heart-rending narrative, which he typifies as "the truth of a mad-man." However, critics began reexamining the contribution of Wiesel's shared memoir and elevated the brief nightmarish narrative to the level of a twentieth-century jeremiad:
For the work's graphic recall of an imponderably monstrous scenario, critic Robert Alter compares Wiesel to Dante, the visionary author who traverses Hell in his Inferno.
Daniel Stern, reviewing for the Nation, proclaims the book "the single most powerful literary relic of the Holocaust."
Lothar Kahn compares Wiesel to an Old Testament prophet and draws a parallel between Wiesel's restless travels and the ceaseless journey of the mythic Wandering Jew, who is said to live forever in spiritual torment.
Josephine Knopp pairs Wiesel's questioning of God with the biblical rebellions of Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah.
Subsequent works by Wiesel maintain his attempt to inspire moral activism and his fear that future generations will forget the lessons of history or turn their backs on preventable horrors.
At the pivotal point in Wiesel's career, he was transformed from a spare, insecure after-dinner speaker to America's Holocaust superstar. Awards continue to pour in from B'nai B'rith, the American Jewish Committee, the State of Israel, Artists and Writers for Peace in the Middle East, the Christopher Foundation, and the International Human Rights Law Group. Foundations have established honorariums for humanitarian Holocaust research and Judaica at the University of Haifa, Bar-Ilan University, and the universities of Denver and Florida.
Out of respect for Wiesel's anguished past and his dedication to human rights issues, literary critics temper reviews with a gentled, but pointed rebuttal. In private, their anonymous sneers ring with the intellectual's cynicism. Against the deluge of popular response, their quarrel with Wiesel's lengthy canon is the repetition of Holocaust themes, especially the guilt that the survivor feels for remaining alive through the whims of fate while more pious or scholarly victims died. Some critics denounce Wiesel's obsession with genocide and his belief that God abandoned Jews, who consider themselves a chosen race:
In 1987, Lawrence L. Langer of the Washington Post commented wryly that Wiesel claimed to be finished with the Holocaust, but "the Holocaust has not yet finished with him." Langer added that the author "returns compulsively to the ruins of the Holocaust world."
Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, considers Wiesel a public joke and a misapplication of the dignified Nobel Peace Prize.
New York Times reviewer Edward Grossman has accused Wiesel of pursuing a "forced march from despair to affirmation."
Irving Howe declares in The New Republic that Wiesel is a publicity seeker; Alfred Kazin augments the charge with claims that the famed death camp survivor is both shallow and self-aggrandizing.
Jeffrey Burke of the New York Times Book Review carries denunciation to greater extremes by lambasting Wiesel for redundancy and purple prose. Such strong dissent impels Wiesel to unburden his conscience and to master the same objectivity in memoir that he demands of his newspaper reportage.
The most personal branch of literature, autobiography consists of diaries, journals, letters, and memoirs. As narratives, autobiographies introduce the reader to intimate thoughts and responses of a single point of view at a precise moment in time. In some instances, the eyewitness' account of notable incidents outweighs the lack of artistry, as is the case with the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a faithful, if hackneyed account of daily happenings during three significant events in English history—the return of the English monarchy in 1660, the Great Fire, and the Great Plague. In the modern era, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl offers the mature observations of a young Jewish girl in an upstairs annex, hidden from the Nazis who overran Holland during World War II. A similar account comes from Zlata Filipovich, who published an account of the Bosnian civil war in Zlata's Diary.
In contrast, Night, an unadorned recreation of events central to Elie Wiesel's separation from his parents and sisters, offers the reader a significant commentary on a single family's disappearance into the bloodthirsty jaws of Hitler's monstrous war machine. The inevitability of death and despair produces a paradox: a heart-rendingly pathetic isolation of a young Jew from his relatives and from his belief in God, and a thrilling last-minute rescue of one of America's most beloved humanitarians from multiple onslaughts of sickness, hunger, fatigue, and emotional trauma. The incisive style of Night shares much with other notable autobiographies:
Like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Wiesel's work dispenses pragmatism and a belief that young people can and should dedicate themselves to higher concerns than frivolity and self-indulgence.
Night shares with St. Augustine's Confessions a firm grasp of spirituality, the sustaining force that guides Elie, even when his conscious mind doubts that a deity can still exist and allow death camps to commit wholesale murder.
In the same vein as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's examination of internment in Farewell to Manzanar, Elie Wiesel analyzes the faces and gestures of villagers, family, and friends as they prepare to depart from their Romanian home and accept a government-issue barracks as makeshift housing.
With parallel qualms to those of Yoko Kawashima Watkins in So Far from the Bamboo Grove, young Elie describes the last glimpse of a beloved parent who has generously given his time, resources, and worthy counsel to equip his child for a bitter fate amid stony-hearted oppressors.
Also, Elie Wiesel echoes James Joyce's coming-of-age frankness, a central factor in the success of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, a work that lays bare similarly honest and painful revelations grounded in an immature, untried set of values.
As a reconstruction of the author's ego at a crucial moment in world history, Night demonstrates the narrator's willingness to face certain death and to cling to the shreds of sanity that remain. Wiesel's command of details forces the reader to observe vicious dogs, to hear the cries of a befuddled old rabbi, to smell the fear in the fleeing evacuees who race through the night toward an unknown fate, to hear a Beethoven melody pierce the night, and to touch the cold, motionless form of the violinist who has expended the last of his artistry in a musical benediction over a scene of heartless savagery.
The choice of La Nuit (Night) as the title of Elie Wiesel's documentary work is propitious in that it epitomizes both physical darkness and the darkness of the soul. Because young Elie and his father observe the sacrifice of a truckload of children in a fiery ditch and watch the flaming corpses light up the night sky at Birkenau, the darkness evokes multiple implications. The crisply methodical work of the Nazi death camps spreads over night and day and actualizes the fanatical intent of Hitler to wipe out all traces of European Jewry. The night that enshrouds their humanity obliterates mercy and human feeling: So long as the perpetrators of consummate evil can view genocide as a worthy job, the "night" of their soullessness shines in medals and commendations for their commitment to the Nazi world view, which pictures a future of blue-eyed blondes, all derived from Gentile backgrounds.
More significant than these intertwined forms of night is the darkening of young Elie's idealism. Once moved to identify with past martyrs of the Babylonian Captivity and the Spanish Inquisition, he finds himself standing outside the romantic episodes of historical anti-Semitism on a dismal scene that his eyes absorb in disbelief. He refrains from wondering if the smoky wreath over Auschwitz's crematories contains the ashes of his mother and sisters. By depersonalizing the fears that lurk in his subconscious and that overwhelm the badly shaken Chlomo, Elie concentrates on food, warmth, and rest. The instinctive need to pray falters on his mind's surface, yet, deep within, he continues to fight the descent of spiritual night that threatens to obliterate God from his being.
On a global scale, Wiesel the writer chooses to incubate the darkness of his memories for a decade, then, at the age of twenty-six, to heed the urgent request of François Mauriac to unveil to the world a front-row memoir of Hitler's hellish night, the palpable blackness that fills his eyes with smoke, his nostrils with the stench of scorched flesh, and his ears with inarticulate cries of the dying. The particularized scenes he flashes on his verbal screen become mere suggestions of a reality that only Holocaust survivors can share. Even though words will always fail his purpose, he persists in recreating his battle against the sooty residue that coats his soul and robs him of his most precious tie with childhood—the orthodox faith that motivated him to pray, read, study, and tread the path of Hasidic Judaism.
In Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he recalled a young man discovering "the kingdom of the night." Like Dante winding downward on a horrific spiral into Hell, young Elie questions how such negation of light can rob the twentieth century of its progress in human relations. At the age of fifty-eight, Elie the Nobelist confronted the reality of the metaphoric night: the silence of apathy, the wordlessness of bystanders who knew the truth of Hitler's death camps but who took no action, made no objection. Like the lone crier who alarms the village to fire, theft, or massacres of old, Elie the Nobelist, Elie the cavalier, finds no rest in his battle against the incessant fall of night. Wherever the shroud of inhumanity descends—on prisons, battlefields, or the pathless flight of refugees—he stirs himself to sound the alarm, to bid the world to strike back at an enveloping cynicism that tempts humanity to turn aside and say nothing.
Early in his exploration of self, young Elie ignores his father's warning about the cabbala and studies a mystical philosophy that demands a maturity and sophistication that come only from experience. According to the dictates of Moses Cordovero, the cabbalist is expected to imitate thirteen divine qualities, cultivated through daily prayer:
Forbearance of detraction or insult
Patience in facing evil
Forgiveness of evil
Understanding of other human beings
Control of anger in thought and deed
Mercy toward all, even the persecutor
Denial of vengeance
Concentration on the good in villains
Uncompromising compassion for those in pain
Honesty
Mercy on people who do good
Nonjudgmental reproof of villains
Respect for the pure, unblemished self that existed in infancy
The culmination of this mystical regimen is the egoless self, a Jewish parallel of the tao, the path to sublime oneness with God.
As did Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, Elie Wiesel expresses a relentless inner compunction to interpret twentieth-century events that confuse, frustrate, or dismay. He writes about his role in World War II to better understand the suffering of Hitler's victims. His conclusions present a grim reckoning of anti-Semitism and death camp philosophy. An avid student of existentialism, which he encountered in the late 1940s under the instruction of novelist Jean-Paul Sartre at the Sorbonne, a French university famous for preparing students of the humanities, Wiesel is heir to the European philosophers, theologians, and writers of the 1920s and 1930s who delineate human significance in terms of action. According to the existentialist's code:
Human beings are often forced into terror and alienation because of their inability to know the future or to control what is done to them or taken from them.
Often political situations create a world vision that is absurd, haphazard, destructive, and vicious toward the hapless individual.
People sometimes attempt to escape meaningless suffering even when the effort causes them more pain, a re-evaluation of life, loss, disillusion, alienation from tradition, or death.
In assuring their own survival, people may disappoint, betray, or abandon friends and family.
The only source of redemption for the world's cruelty and suffering must come from individuals willing to confront their oppressors.
Existentialism defines the hero as a solitary figure who transcends human weakness to undergo absurdly meaningless peril. Goaded by a need to penetrate the mysteries of the universe, this lone hero must abide by the dictates of conscience and exert finite, human powers to break free from isolation, anguish, passivity, or despair. As demonstrated in Night, the redemptive power of commitment, spirituality, moral tenacity, and integrity resides in action—the localized, often feeble performance of forgiveness, charity, and acceptance of others.
A familiar figure in European lore is Ahasuerus, a mortal doomed to live forever. His legend, first published in Leiden, the Netherlands, in an anonymous monograph dated 1602, predates the printed version and describes a Jew from Hamburg who had been a contemporary of Jesus Christ, who was crucified around 30 A. D. When Jerusalem's mockers demanded that Jesus was a false claimant of the title of Messiah or savior of the human race, Ahasuerus joined the mob and taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion. In token of the Jew's rejection, Jesus promised that Ahasuerus would remain alive until the Second Coming, when the Messiah would return from heaven to fulfill biblical prophecy.
The haunting story of Ahasuerus spread over Europe and found its way into numerous artistic and literary works—in direct reference and subtle allusion. The eternal wanderer, known in French as le juif errant, spawned a body of lore that is the opposite of the Faust legend: Instead of avoiding death, the Wandering Jew, the only living witness to Jesus' execution, craves an end to the curse of immortality, which he bears like a cross in his search for a final resting place. The modern critical community draws parallels between the miraculously long-lived Jew and the restless Elie Wiesel, whose journalistic and humanitarian travels keep him perpetually on the road, often for the purpose of drawing to the world's attention an untenable condition that threatens nations with war, famine, starvation, or genocide. The potential for romanticism dims beside the real man, an obviously weary benefactor of humanity who expects neither praise nor remuneration for his crusade. The comparison with the Wandering Jew ennobles Dr. Wiesel, a stalwart witness to the world's most dreadful era of systematic annihilation of an innocent race.
From the beginning, Elie Wiesel's work details the threshold of his adult awareness of Judaism, its history, and its significance to the devout. His emotional response to stories of past persecution contributes to his faith, which he values as a belief system rich with tradition and unique in its philosophy. A divisive issue between young Elie and Chlomo is the study of supernatural lore, a subset of Judaic wisdom that lies outside the realm of Chlomo's pragmatism. To Chlomo, the good Jew attends services, prays, rears a family according to biblical dictates, celebrates religious festivals, and reaches out to the needy, whatever their faith.
From age twelve onward, Elie deviates from his father's path by remaining in the synagogue after the others leave and conducting with Moshe the Beadle an intense questioning of the truths within a small segment of mystic lore. The emotional gravity of Elie's study unites with the early adolescent penchant for obsession, particularly of a topic as entrancing as the history of the Spanish Inquisition or the Babylonian Captivity. Moshe's mutterings strike a respondent chord in Elie as he ponders prophecy of the Messiah, "such snatches as you could hear told of the suffering of the divinity, of the Exile of Providence, who, according to the cabbala, awaits his deliverance in that of man." It comes as no surprise that Elie's personal test jars his youthful faith with demands and temptations to doubt because he lacks experience with evil.
When Moshe returns from his own testing in the Galician forest, his story seems incredible to Sighet's Jews, including Elie. Later, the test of faith that undermines Elie's belief in a merciful God is the first night at Birkenau and the immolation of infants in a fiery trench. The internal battlefield of Elie's conscience gives him no peace as atrocities become commonplace, including hangings before breakfast. The author's admission of weakness casts no doubt on his uprightness; rather, the back-and-forth debate that empties the core of faith from his heart proves his sincerity toward God, whom he perpetually reaches toward with fearful hands. The extreme realism of Elie's test of faith at Auschwitz portrays in miniature the widespread question of suffering that afflicts Europe's Jews during an era when no one is safe and no one can count on tomorrow. Although Elie omits fasting and forgets to say Kaddish for Akiba Drumer, the fact that Elie incubates the book for a decade and writes an original text of 800 pages proves that the explanation of faith and undeserved suffering is a subject that a teenage boy is poorly equipped to tackle.
Since biblical times—but especially since the beginning of the mid-nineteenth century—Jews have longed for a permanent home in the Holy Land, a stretch of rugged, but historically significant land on the eastern Mediterranean shore, stretching north from the Gulf of Aqaba over the Negev Desert, west of the Dead Sea and Jordan, and north to the borders of Syria and Lebanon.
The early name for this area of land was Palestine, first settled by agricultural people around 8000 B.C. Hebrew tribes began populating the land in the twelfth century B.C., and eventually it was ruled by Saul, David, and Solomon around 1000 B.C. The kingdom later split into two states, Israel and Judah, which were, in turn, conquered by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Afterward, the area was ruled by foreign powers—the Persians, Alexander the Great, and the Ptolemies, among others.
Romans took possession of the country in 63 B.C. and stationed Herod the Great on the throne in 37 B.C. Jesus was born into this Roman-ruled, Jewish world which would, after his crucifixion become a Christian nation. Some 500 years later, Arabs took possession, and it became an Islamic nation; by the tenth century A.D., most of the inhabitants had converted to Islam. In 1099, Western crusaders established rule, but they were eventually routed by armies of the Egyptian sultans, the Mamelukes. In 1516, the country became part of the mighty Ottoman Empire.
The influx of European Jews into the area began in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Jews living in Europe, especially those in Poland and Russia, fled from Cossack butchery and Russian pogroms, or massacres, and began immigrating into this part of the Ottoman Empire, where they established primitive farming communities. United by a common religion and the Hebrew language, they were fervent in their belief—despite having to live in crude huts and tents, exposed to the continual menace of malaria, and resented by their unfriendly Palestinian neighbors—that they had returned to a land that had, since biblical times, been divinely promised to them as a national home.
At the beginning of World War I, Great Britain inflamed the passion for a Jewish homeland on an international level by issuing the Balfour Declaration, promising a home for the Jewish people within Palestine. The war ended in 1918 and Great Britain supplanted the crumbling Turkish influence; Palestine was now in the hands of the British. The League of Nations further sanctioned the role of Great Britain in creating a Jewish state.
The plan for a Jewish homeland began to founder as Arabs realized that Zionism had spurred an immense, unprecedented immigration of Jews who suddenly destabilized a centuries-old Arab milieu. The newcomers' land-grabbing, communal living, and insistence on gender equality angered and appalled the native Palestinians, and outbreaks of hostility soon led to bloody confrontations.
Ever greater waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine resulted from the growth of Nazi hate groups in Germany and its fascist satellites during the 1930s. In 1935, for example, over 61,000 European Jews felt so threatened that they left their homes, jobs, and families and immigrated to Palestine. From 1936-39, Palestinians erupted in a series of riots, trying to force Britain out of power to save what they considered their ancestral land from the mounting tide of Zionists.
The world's reaction to the execution of six million Jews during the Holocaust forced the matter of a Jewish homeland onto the agenda of the fledgling United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved a partition of lands, dividing Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. On May 13, 1948, British peacekeepers relinquished their control.
The next day, Jewish Zionists proclaimed Israel a sovereign state, with David Ben-Gurion as leader. A day later, Jordanian and Egyptian forces invaded the new nation and initiated a bloody era of terrorism, open warfare, and usurpation. During the first year of the new Jewish state, over 6,000 Jews were killed. By this time, however, Israel was now a militarily strong and victorious nation. It had increased its original territory by fifty percent and had reclaimed Jerusalem, a city held sacred by Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
During the following years, the displacement of Arab refugees after they had lost their lands to Israel in military upheavals kept the area in a perpetual state of unrest, including the war for control of the Suez Canal in 1956, the Six-Day War in 1967 (which increased Israel's territory two hundred percent), the assassination of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in 1972, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
A respite from continuous war between Israel and its neighbors took place in 1979 at Camp David, Maryland. During a meeting brokered by U.S. president Carter, President Sadat of Egypt met with Israel's Prime Minister Begin, and both men signed the first peace treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors. Israel agreed to return the oil-rich fields of the Sinai to Egypt, and, in return, Egypt, a powerful Arab state, officially recognized Israel as a state. In addition, Israel also agreed to work for peace, including an eventual plan for Palestinian autonomy.
War broke out again in 1982 when PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon began mounting raids into Israel. In retaliation, Israel bombed Beirut for nearly two months and successfully routed Yasir Arafat and his army from the country.
Eleven years later, in September 1993, despite strained relations, Yasir Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres signed an accord in Washington, D.C., stating that Israel and the PLO recognized each other's right to exist. The PLO promised to abandon its terroristic holy war against Israel, and Israel, in turn, granted self-rule to the Palestinian entities of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Rabin, Peres, and Arafat later shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
Today's Israel, about the size of Massachusetts, is a highly urbanized nation, peerlessly democratic in its social laws, and in an area of the world where religious wars are commonplace, freedom of religion is guaranteed by law to Muslims and Christians living in the country. In addition, Israel has become one of the world's most envied nations in providing educational and health care services to its people. In terms of its economy, the nation is heavily dependent on oil for its energy, and thus it is a major Mediterranean ally in the U.S. struggle to protect the oil fields that fuel the world's industrial growth of the latter half of the twentieth century.
A professional journalist of Elie Wiesel's experience demonstrates that a knowledge and application of literary devices become a natural part of writing. Sprinkled sparsely, yet precisely through the straightforward narrative are language patterns that enhance thought and emotion. For example:
exclamations
Have mercy on him! I, his only son!
Blessed be the Name of the Eternal!
periodic sentences
I would often sit with him in the evening after the service, listening to his stories and trying my hardest to understand his grief.
Despite the trials and privations, his face still shone with his inner purity.
balanced sentences
I had known that he was at the end, on the brink of death, and yet I had abandoned him.
During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple.
extended appositives
The Jews of Sighet—that little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood—were very fond of him.
Suddenly, someone threw his arms around my neck in an embrace: Yechiel, brother of the rabbi of Sighet.
sentence fragments
Revolvers, machine guns, police dogs.
Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach.
similes
He looked us over as if we were a pack of leprous dogs hanging onto our lives.
Monday passed like a small summer cloud, like a dream in the first daylight hours.
rhetorical questions
Had I changed so much, then?
Poor Father! Of what then did you die?
cause and effect
"Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating.
To this day, whenever I hear Beethoven played my eyes close and out of the dark rises the sad, pale face of my Polish friend, as he said farewell on his violin to an audience of dying men.
dialogue
"I can see them, son. I can see them all right. Let them sleep. It's so long since they closed their
eyes . . . They are exhausted . . . exhausted . . ."
His voice was tender.
I yelled against the wind:
"They'll never wake again! Never! Don't you understand?"
"What do you want?"
"My father's ill," I answered for him. "Dysentery. . ."
"Dysentery? That's not my business. I'm a surgeon. Go on! Make room for the others."
foreshadowing
Jews, listen to me! I can see a fire! There are huge flames! It is a furnace.
The Jews in Budapest are living in an atmosphere of fear and terror. There are anti-Semitic incidents every day, in the streets, in the trains.
short declarative sentences
I hadn't any strength left for running. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know.
I was fifteen years old.
Because the Stella Rodway translation of Wiesel's original text transfers thought from French to English, it loses the cadence, line length, rhyme, and lingual stress of the original language, particularly alliteration and onomatopoeia. For example, an extended parallel structure expresses Elie's disillusion in Section 3, a dramatic outpouring which is cited below in French with an interlinear translation:
Jamais je n'oublierai ces instants qui assassinèrent mon Dieu et
Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and
mon âme, et mes rêves qui prirent le visage du désert.
my soul and turned my dreams to dust.
Jamais je n'oublierai cela, même si j'éstis condamné à vivre aussi
Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as
longtemps que Dieu lui-même. Jamais.
long as God Himself. Never.
When translators such as Rodway move from one modern language to another, they recover no more than eighty percent of the connotative, or implied, meaning of the text—particularly one that utilizes German titles as well as bits of Hebrew. An even greater challenge is translation of an ancient text, such as the Bible or the cabbala, into a modern language. The resultant version must leap over centuries of social customs, idioms, and human progress to produce an inkling of the motivation and verbal mastery of the primary author. Thus, translators regularly apply their special skills to ancient texts to maintain a close contact with the intent and meaning of the original writer.
Timeline 1928
September 30: Elie Wiesel is born in Sighet, Romania, which later becomes Hungarian territory.
1930
January: Brown-shirted storm troopers murder eight Berlin Jews.
October: Nazis hold 107 seats in the Reichstag, Germany's parliament.
1933
January: Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
March: Hitler rises to dictator and withdraws Germany from the League of Nations. Heinrich Himmler establishes Dachau outside Munich, Germany, as the first Nazi death camp; thousands of Jews are murdered here, some in brutal medical experiments.
April: All Jews working in government jobs or teaching in universities are fired.
July: The Nazi party is formally declared to be the only political party in Germany.
1935
September: Nuremberg Laws revoke Jewish citizenship and ban intermarriage with Gentiles.
1936
October: Germany allies with Italy and Japan.
1937
July: Buchenwald concentration camp begins receiving convoys.
1938
March: Germany controls Austria.
Early Summer: Romanian fascists strip Jews of citizenship.
October: Hitler evicts German Jews from their homes and forces them into ghettos.
November 9-10: Nazis carry out a devastating plan called Kristallnacht (literally, "Crystal Night," or the Night of Broken Glass), which destroys 7500 Jewish-owned stores and synagogues. Jewish children are banned from German schools. Twenty thousand Jews are taken into "protective custody" and sent to concentration camps. Many Jews emigrate.
1939
January: Hitler reveals his intention to annihilate the Jewish race.
March: Hitler captures the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
August: Germany and Russia enter a ten-year non-aggression pact.
September: Germany precipitates World War II by invading Poland.
1940
April: Germany overruns Norway and Denmark. Auschwitz, Poland, becomes a concentration camp.
June: Germany overruns France.
August: Nazis confine Jews to ghettos.
October-November: Romanian Nazis confiscate Jewish homes, farms, and businesses.
1941
January: Nazis massacre 170 Jews in Bucharest.
June: Nazis shoot 212,000 Romanians. Germany attacks Russia.
September: Himmler uses Zyklon B at Auschwitz. Nazis machine-gun more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev, Russia.
October 15: Nazis declare Jews outlaws.
December 7: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. Hitler declares war on the United States.
December 8: Chelmo is the first death camp to use mobile annihilation vans.
Late December: Twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel meets Moshe the Beadle.
1942
Late in the year: Moshe the Beadle escapes Gestapo slaughter to warn the Jews in Sighet. Nazis transport 200,000 Jews to Trans-Dniestria, in the southwestern Ukraine. Two-thirds die of hunger and disease; others depart for Palestine.
1943
March: Crematories open at Auschwitz.
April: The Warsaw ghetto rebels against the Nazis.
July: Mussolini's government collapses. Allies pursue Nazis into Italy.
1944
March: Adolf Eichmann supervises the deportation of Hungarian Jews.
April: Nazis arrest Jewish leaders and close synagogues in Sighet. Jews are quarantined. Nazis confiscate valuables and force Sighet Jews to wear the yellow Star of David and ban them from restaurants, cafes, and public transportation.
May 16: All Sighet Jews are forced from their homes and told to line up in the street at 8 A.M. At 1 P.M., the first group departs by train.
Several days later: Elie's family marches to the "little ghetto."
A few days later: The Wiesels join the last group of deportees aboard a railway cattle car.
Late May: The convoy reaches Birkenau, and Elie and Chlomo spend their first night in camp. Summer Guards send Elie and Chlomo to Auschwitz. There, they meet Stein of Antwerp. Elie and Chlomo march to Buna. Elie is tattooed A-7713 on his left arm.
July 20: Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg attempts to murder Hitler.
August 25: The Allies liberate Paris.
October 26: Himmler dismantles the Auschwitz crematory.
1945
January: Elie undergoes surgery in the Auschwitz infirmary. Chlomo and Elie run with evacuees to Gleiwitz, where they and others board open cattle cars for a ten-day ride to Buchenwald in central Germany.
January 18: The Red Army liberates Auschwitz.
Late January: Chlomo Wiesel dies in a bunk at Buchenwald.
February: Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin meet at Yalta to discuss the end of the war in Europe. Allied troops reach the Rhine.
April: The resistance launches an attack on Buchenwald's SS. American forces liberate Buchenwald and Dachau. Elie falls ill with food poisoning. Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide in a Berlin bunker.
May: General Jodl signs Germany's surrender to the Allies.
July-August: Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Joseph Stalin discuss the denazification of Germany.
1946
The Nuremberg Trials begin to punish war criminals.
1947
Elie Wiesel enters the Sorbonne in Paris.
1948
May 14: Israel proclaims itself an independent, sovereign state.
1952
Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl is published in English.
1955
François Mauriac convinces Elie to write about the Holocaust.
1956
Elie Wiesel comes to the United States.
1960
Night is published in English; it originally appeared in 1958, in French, as La Nuit.
Before a poignant face-to-face visit with a young interviewer for a Tel Aviv newspaper, French writer François Mauriac describes his apprehension. After Elie Wiesel knocks at his door, however, he feels an immediate kinship and tells young Wiesel about the trauma he suffered when he learned from his wife about Hitler's cruelty toward children. She had seen trainloads of them at the Austerlitz station, and, at that time, neither Mauriac nor his wife knew about the death camps. All they knew was that these thousands of children had been separated from their parents.
Wiesel says that he is a death camp survivor, and Mauriac is deeply moved. He tells us that Wiesel is "one of God's elect." The elderly Frenchman realizes that the horrors of smoking crematories and their hopeless victims have incarcerated Elie in a perpetual isolation and angst that did not end with the liberation of 1945. Mauriac searches for proof that God is love but has no evidence to counter Elie's grim testimony. He remembers weeping wordlessly and embracing the young journalist.
Novelist and playwright François Mauriac (1885-1970), one of France's most prestigious Christian writers, was seventy when he met twenty-seven-year-old Elie Wiesel. In the Foreword to Night, the first-person documentary that he helped Wiesel publish, Mauriac alludes to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, an optimistic, progressive period of rational thought from which evolved an overthrow of the monarchy during the French Revolution in 1789. Although he believes in the principles of the Enlightenment and in human advancement, a looming sense of the world's regression into barbarism struck him at the beginning of World War I. Mauriac's pessimism didn't reach its height, however, until the Nazi perversion of science produced efficient death camps as a means of ridding Adolf Hitler's dream state of all people whom he deemed unfit to live in it or to contribute to the building of a Master Race. Mauriac's conclusion forms the central theme in the book: Hitler's annihilation of defenseless children constitutes "absolute evil," an act of heinous destruction with no redeeming purpose.
Mauriac's intense relationship with the young eyewitness leads him to hope that as many people will read Wiesel's Night as read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. The two works deal with the same historical era and are written from a Jewish point of view. However, a diversity of setting and action sets them apart. Anne Frank's journal describes the day-to-day preparations for a Jewish family's concealment from the SS in the annex of a Dutch import warehouse, where they listen to forbidden radio broadcasts and cheer on the Allies as World War II winds to a close. The diary stops short of the family's arrest, separation, and deportation to a concentration camp, where Anne dies of typhus within months of the war's end. A more chilling first-person narration, Elie Wiesel's Night introduces a similar trusting attitude that the war will soon end and leave them unscathed. The terrible irony of Elie's deportation with fellow Romanian villagers and his failed attempt to keep his father alive surpasses The Diary of a Young Girl in the enormity of SS cruelty, racism, and murderous intent to rid the expanding Third Reich of eleven million human beings whom the Nazis labeled as "undesirables."
Mauriac's pairing of the two eyewitness accounts is a worthy suggestion: Any reader captivated by Anne Frank's innocence and stalwart spirit will profit from reading about the collapse of optimism and religious faith revealed in Elie Wiesel's plight. The same irony applies to Wiesel's account: His terror in total isolation and helplessness occurs only months from rescue by Allied forces during the closing weeks of World War II.