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Night, by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, an account of his experiences in German concentration camps as a teenager during World War II. It is much the most affecting book I've read in a long while — perhaps ever. If you've never read it, do get a copy and set aside some quiet time to give this book the attention it deserves.
Raised in Sighet, Hungary, Wiesel's first experience of nazism came when he was 14, when "foreign" jews were forced to leave the town. A year later, in 1943, one — only one — of them returned with a horrific, unbelievable story.
He told me what had happened to him and his companions. The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once in Polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns.
[ ... ]
Even I did not believe him.
In 1944, the Jews of Sighet were forced to abandon their homes and businesses and live in a ghetto.
Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.
Only a few months later he was in Auschwitz, 15-years old, facing with sick disbelief the crematoriums and wondering how such a thing could be underway in the modern world.
Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes, children thrown into the flames."
And on ... and on ... and on.
The Holocaust is no prehistoric horror. At least some of the soldiers who used babies for target practice are yet alive. Nor are its depravities something unique to some peculiarity of German culture; mass graves, allegedly dug by their inhabitants, have been discovered in post-Hussein Iraq, too. Charismatic monsters are one of history's staples, and they arise in all times and places.
So, too, is the silence of cowardice a staple; we saw it as recently as last week, when Western governments and the free press knuckled to the savagery of Islamic fanatics.
Like so many others, Wiesel has spent his life wondering why he, nobody special, survived; in his Nobel acceptance speech, he imagined the boy he was then asking the man he is now whether he had made good use of his good fortune:
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 naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and 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.
And, "Those who cannot learn from history," the philosopher George Santayana once said, "are condemned to repeat it."
an account of his experiences in German concentration camps as a teenager during World War II. It is much the most affecting book I've read in a long while — perhaps ever. If you've never read it, do get a copy and set aside some quiet time to give this book the attention it deserves.
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