Must Read Autobiographies - VII

Night

Elie Wiesel

Night, written by Elie Wiesel about his experience in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, was published in 1958 in French and in English in 1960.

The book had been translated into 30 languages, and is considered as an important book on Holocaust.

The books begins in Sighet in 1941 as narrated by an orthodox Jew teenager, Eliezer. The Hungarian Government expelled those Jews who were unable to prove their citizenship. Moshe is crammed into a cattle train and shipped to Poland. He escapes and returns to Sighet. and tells his experience of cruelty of Gestapo to one and all. The Jews of Sighet did not believe him.

The Germans arrived in Sighet around 21 March 1944, and shortly after Passover arrested the community leaders. Jews had to hand over their valuables, were not allowed to visit restaurants or leave home after six in the evening, and had to wear the yellow star at all times.

The SS transfer the Jews to one of two ghettos, each with its own council or Judenrat. Eleizer's house on a corner of Serpent Street was in the larger ghetto in the town centre, so his family was able to stay at home, though the windows on the non-ghetto side had to be boarded up.

In May 1944 the Judenrat is told the ghettos will be closed with immediate effect and the residents deported. Eliezer's family is first moved to the smaller ghetto, but they are not told their final destination, only that they may each take a few personal belongings. The Hungarian police, wielding truncheons and rifle butts, march Eliezer's neighbours through the streets.

Eliezer and his family are crammed into a closed cattle wagon with 80 others. Men and women are separated on arrival at Auschwitz. Eliezer and his father are "selected" to go to the left, which meant forced labour; his mother, Hilda, Beatrice and Tzipora to the right, the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice managed to survive.

The remainder of Night describes Eliezer's efforts not to be parted from his father, not even to lose sight of him; his grief and shame at witnessing his father's decline into helplessness; and as their relationship changes and the young man becomes the older man's caregiver, his resentment and guilt, because his father's existence threatens his own. The stronger Eliezer's need to survive, the weaker the bonds that tie him to other people.

In or around August 1944 Eliezer and his father are transferred from Birkenau to the work camp at Monowitz, their lives reduced to the avoidance of violence and the search for food. Their only joy is when the Americans bomb Buchenwald concentration camp

In January 1945, with the Soviet army approaching, the Germans decide to flee, taking 60,000 inmates on a death march to concentration camps in Germany. Eliezer and his father are marched to Gleiwitz to be put on a freight train to Buchenwald, 350 miles  from Auschwitz.

The inmates spend two days and nights in Gleiwitz locked inside cramped barracks without food, water or heat, sleeping on top of one another, so that each morning the living wake with the dead underneath them. There is more marching to the train station and onto a cattle wagon with no roof. They travel for ten days and nights, with only the snow falling on them for water. Of the 100 in Eliezer's wagon, 12 survive the journey. The living make space by throwing the dead onto the tracks:

The Germans are waiting with loudhailers and orders to head for a hot bath. Wiesel is desperate for the heat of the water, but his father sinks into the snow.  An alert sounds, the camp lights go out, and Eliezer, exhausted, follows the crowd to the barracks, leaving his father behind. He wakes at dawn on a wooden bunk, remembering that he has a father, and goes in search of him.

His father is in another block, sick with dysentery. The other men in his bunk, a Frenchman and a Pole, attack him because he can no longer go outside to relieve himself. Eliezer is unable to protect him. 

Begging for water one night from his bunk, where he has lain for a week, Chlomo is beaten on the head with a truncheon by an SS officer for making too much noise. Eliezer lies in the bunk above and does nothing for fear of being beaten too. He hears his father make a rattling noise, "Eliezer." In the morning, 29 January 1945, he finds another man in his father's place. The Kapos had come before dawn and taken Chlomo to the crematorium

Chlomo missed his freedom by three months. The Soviets had liberated Auschwitz 11 days earlier, and the Americans were making their way towards Buchenwald. Eliezer is transferred to the children's block where he stays with 600 others, dreaming of soup. On 5 April 1945 the inmates are told the camp is to be liquidated and they are to be moved—another death march. On 11 April, with 20,000 inmates still inside, the inmates attack the remaining SS officers and takes control. At six o'clock that evening, an American tank arrives at the gates, and behind it the Sixth Armored Division of the United States Third Army.

The superb rendering of human drama makes the book a must read.

Namaste

Prabir