Night - Elie Wiesel - Part 1

Night - Elie Wiesel

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 169

June 18, 2017 

Book 49 - Night
Elie Wiesel (1972)
 Part 1 - p. vii-xxi, 1-65
Reading Time - 1.2 hour

This is a slim volume but a devastatingly powerful. Elie Wiesel was a Romanian Jew who was, along with his father, mother and three sisters, sent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 1944. Elie and two of his sisters survived the war.

The striking thing in the first part is the naivety of the Jews in Transylvania. Even when the Fascists seized power and let the Germans into the country, the Jews tried to keep up an optimistic attitude. It's the 20th Century after all. One foreign Jew who was sent to a concentration camp a year or so earlier managed to escape and came back. He warned them of what was happening... and no one believed him. They thought he was crazy. Such things couldn't happen in this day and age. Yet they did.

The other thing that struck me was how quickly human beings can adapt to cruelty. How quickly the virtues of kindness and compassion can be traded in for selfishness and self-preservation. Anything to avoid getting beaten yourself.

It is in this book that Elie recounts the story of a young boy who was hanged in one of the concentration camps. "Where is God? He is there... hanging on the gallows." I had always seen this interpreted, in Christian circles at least, from a Christocentric perspective. The unity of our human suffering to the suffering of Christ that is, in some way, redemptive. But that is reading too much of Christ into the story. For Elie... his belief in God hung in tatters on those gallows. Where was God? He was dead.