"Killing Them a Second Time": Elie Wiesel's Night
I can’t think of a statement as needlessly provocative as Oscar Wilde’s seminal proclamation that “all art is quite useless.”
Come on. It’s fantastic ragebait. If some Twitter cave troll posted it we’d be foaming at the mouth. As is, the fact that it shows up in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey, a novel very set on both usefully and beautifully criticizing its society and time makes it even harder to swallow.
But I found myself thinking of Wilde when revisiting Elie Wiesel’s Night, a novel on the American 9th grade English curriculum I’ll be teaching next semester. Night is a Holocaust novel — the Holocaust novel, really, because some people have somehow managed to get upset at The Diary of Anne Frank — and it is taught, very simply, because it is useful. Most kids, by the time they get to us, haven’t been taught the Holocaust, and it serves as an early gesture towards the idea of human evil. Indeed, many of the suburban children I teach suffer under the presumption that the world is an inherently fair place because, well, it has been for them thus far. They’ve learned about abstracted individual suffering, sure, about homelessness and murder and tragic little one-offs, but the idea of a planned desolation at the scale of millions of people — that’s new. Night gets all of that across in about a hundred pages at a grade-appropriate Lexile level.
I understand its place in the curriculum — but Wilde’s little quip keeps coming back to me.
Night is useful. But is it good? And to accept Wilde’s axiom on its face, and follow it to its conclusion: if it’s useful, is it still art?
Night is a simple book, at least in terms of the covered narrative. It starts with a 12-year-old Elie Wiesel. It’s 1941. He lives in the Jewish part of Sighet, in what was then Transylvania and is now Hungary. He wants to study Kabbalah, and recruits a mentor, Moishe the Beadle, with whom he would spend his days studying the Talmud and nights running to the Synagogue to “weep over the destruction of the Temple.” Subtle.
But Moishe vanishes one day, and returns, months later, with a dire warning of the Gestapo, forcing Jews to dig the trenches that they would be buried in. But the Jews of Sighet don’t go, and by 1944, their own nightmare begins: a painful march to the trains where they’re stuffed like cattle, which take them to the doors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is separated from his sister and mother, whom he never sees again, and suffers for months with his ailing father until the prisoners are forcibly moved to Buna, and then Gleiwitz, and finally Buchenwald, due to the encroaching Soviets. He’s tortured and dehumanized and broken, his father dying and his faith shattered, during this descent into “the Kingdom of Night,” as he puts it in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, which he received for his activism and in large part for this novel.
And indeed, Night was his first novel, and by far his most famous. It was originally written in Yiddish as “Un di velt hot geshvign” (”And the World Remained Silent”), a doorstopper that Wiesel struggled to find a publisher for. He translated it into French himself to no avail, but eventually condensed the volume into 178 pages with the help of a few French editors. That shorter novel was then further shortened into a slim 116 pages, and translated into English. Wiesel himself didn’t speak much English at the time, and thus could give only an uninformed approval of the translation. It was only when his wife, Marion Wiesel, floated concerns that the English version of his “La Nuit” wasn’t the best representation of his vision in 2006 that the novel was retranslated, and it was done so with his consent and approval. We can take that English translation, then, to be as good of a version as could be hoped for without him taking over the project himself — that he, sharing a bed with the translator, would also have shared any grievances he had over the work.
Wiesel also started the project with ambition. In his preface to the 2006 translation, he writes:
Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language.
And yet, the prose feels limp, uncertain. Far from inventing a new language, Wiesel fails within the one he has.
In Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook,” she writes the following:
…the ellipsis, which is trying to imply a weighty “something” that has not been said but that the poet wants felt, is a construct of weakness… more apt to sink the ship than to float it.
I think someone ought to have told Wiesel that. It might be easier to find key moments that Wiesel intended to imbue with emotion that are marred by ellipses than those that aren’t.
After a young man who stole from camp stores during an air raid is put to death, Wiesel writes, “I remember that on that evening, the soup tasted better than ever…”
When Wiesel thinks of his own family, likely dead, he renders it simply: “From time to time, in the middle of all that talk, a thought crossed my mind: Where is Mother right now… and Tzipora…” His emotion, however genuine, feels hackneyed, trite.
It angers me that it feels this way. The Holocaust is not our only genocide, but it is still our most notable one, and I recall the impact it had on me, when I first learned of it; it’s a civilizational nightmare, still twitching in the dark even now. I do not want to read its most public record and feel scornful. But the prose betrays me; or perhaps more broadly, it betrays him.
Consider the following passage, which, to its credit, is affecting.
We were coming closer and closer to the pit, from which an infernal heat was rising. Twenty more steps. If I was going to kill myself, this was the time. Our column had only some fifteen steps to go. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten more steps. Eight. Seven. We were walking slowly, as one follows a hearse, our own funeral procession. Only four more steps. Three. There it was now, very close to us, the pit and its flames. I gathered all that remained of my strength in order to break rank and throw myself onto the barbed wire. Deep down, I was saying good-bye to my father, to the whole universe, and, against my will, I found myself whispering the words: “Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba…” May His name be exalted and sanctified…
And there, as inevitable and unselfconscious as death, are the ellipses.
My heart was about to burst. There. I was face-to-face with the Angel of Death…
It’s camp. It’s maudlin. Jason Voorhees would look at those ellipses and realize he needed to up the kitsch to match. The instances mentioned thus far would be sufficient to give me pause, but the tyranny of the ellipses continues into the dialogue.
“Just you wait, kid… You will see what it costs to leave your work… You’ll pay for this later… And now go back to your place…
This line is said by one of the kapos, a Jewish inmate in a concentration camp who was forced to be a stand-in guard for the Nazis. They were forced, but many handed out their own petty cruelties, too; to cope, maybe, or just because nothing much seemed real anymore. And there is potential, here, again, to look into evil’s everyday face, the people who argue that they were powerless to stop the systems they perpetuated. But instead, we’re met with a swaggering henchman of the stock type, with nothing to differentiate him from his campy, comic brothers — not even the fact that he was real, and gave Wiesel twenty-five lashes.
To summarize: the ellipses baffle. One wonders if Wiesel is hiding something; that the ellipses are casual acts of omission, little censorings of lines too unpleasant for the page or only half-remembered.
But Wiesel is a man who is unafraid of minor inaccuracies. Consider the following from the New York Times article covering Marion Wiesel’s 2006 version.
In the previous translation, published in 1960, the narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is “not quite 15.” But the scene takes place in 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. In the new edition, when asked his age, he replies, “15.”
“At no point did this change the meaning and the fact of anything in the book,” Ms. Wiesel said. “When I worked on the book, I kidded Elie and told him, ‘I don’t think you can add.’
This is an entirely harmless error, but it does reveal to us that Wiesel was not a man paralyzed by an adherence to absolute accuracy. But it does mean that it would likely be a mistake to understand Wiesel’s ellipses as anything other than a deliberate authorial choice.
And there are other instances of what I would call failures of technique rather than vision. Metaphors limp onto the page to die on the next; for example, Wiesel takes the time to describe a much beloathed bell, which rang at regular intervals to signal that he and his fellow inmates ought to move to whatever task their vile overseers intended. It is a manifestation of their lack of control over their own lives, that bell “that regulated everything” and entirely dictated the last days of many of their lives. Wiesel goes so far as to say that “whenever [he] happened to dream of a better world,” he imagined it to be one “without a bell.” Great; look at this functional image that propels the narrative! Surely this idea underpins the whole of the text, given that it would have shaped the minutiae of their lives, the one thing that the prisoners, without it, could have still pretended was their own?
No; the bell is mentioned for a single paragraph, and without adornment twice before. The bell that Wiesel felt it so important to tell us that he “hated,” whose relevance is without question to the greater narrative, lives and dies in the space of a few sentences.
We’re left instead with numbing descriptions of atrocity. And perhaps they ought to be numbing; perhaps we too should feel, coming through the text, that each event is banal, insultingly dull, and that this absence of anything beyond dull terror is the point. The prisoners aren’t given the freedom of thought; hunger numbs them to anything but its own gnawing insistence.
Of course, I haven’t experienced that sort of dull terror or hunger, so it is perhaps in poor taste for me to criticize his depictions of it. I struggled with this, during the crafting of this review: that all of my criticisms were gauche and hateful, and that I ought to direct my furies elsewhere. And if Night’s failings were only these, I would, but a greater failure looms, one that causes me to question why it’s taught at all.
Hannah Arendt, author of the seminal Origins of Totalitarianism, writes the following in Eichmann in Jerusalem:
“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”
I’m not going to deny that evil is banal: we lose much when we romanticize and exoticize it. But I’m not asking for, as Arendt says, Iago, or a Macbeth or Mephistopheles. I don’t need the villains of the Holocaust to monologue throughout Night for all of their sundry reasons.
All Night needed to do, in my eyes, was to think about what its role was, as a novel showing the world the Holocaust, and, more specifically, to show that people saw it, and nevertheless allowed it to occur. The reflection of the chimneys burned in the eyes of the guards, and upon that flat affect the reader must question what they would do, in such a situation; if their doing would do much, and, discouraged, if they would accept atrocity. A reflection would be sufficient; if not, a depiction of a quiet kind of evil rather than screaming melodrama.
Wiesel does this a few precious times. Near the end of the text, we’re blessed with the following description:
Occasionally, we would pass through German towns. Usually, very early in the morning. German laborers were going to work. They would stop and look at us without surprise. One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest.
Years later, I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Our ship’s passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the “natives,” who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady: “Please, don’t throw any more coins!” “Why not?” said she. “I like to give charity…”
The worker sees them as subhuman, as does that elegant Parisian lady with her ellipses; she sees them as human as doves, perhaps, or less. There is evil here, and everywhere.
But Night is, in many ways, a distant text that exposits little: that above is about as much as we ever get in terms of Wiesel’s musings as to what caused this to happen. We get those over-the-top sections, like with that swaggering kapos and his ellipses, but in between those overt instances we get a light hand that dehumanizes the perpetrators of the Holocaust — by which I mean that it removes the notion of human agency from what happened.
Consider this quote from the text:
At ten o’clock, we were handed our daily ration of bread. A dozen or so SS surrounded us. At the gate, the sign proclaimed that work meant freedom. We were counted.
Look at the passive voice! “We were counted” — bah! Was there no human face you looked upon for mercy, that turned its gaze away? Did robots count you? Did monkeys?
One could make an argument that Wiesel is writing from a deeply autobiographical place — that he has endeavored to preserve his own fifteen-or-so-year-old voice in all of its pain. No one in his situation, I think, would have been able to observe much of the individuals who did this to him. But this is a memoir, not a live rendering, and I struggle with the notion that this sort of anonymizing beam is a useful authorial choice. In fact, I imagine the high school student body (and even adults who should know better) would read language like this and think that an entity known as THE HOLOCAUST marched Wiesel across the German-occupied Polish countryside — that the bodies thrown into the gas chambers were done so by its dark hand. And if we continue with this idea, considering that it could have been on purpose, then one could argue that a part of the horror of the Holocaust is the fact that it became an egregore, a self-justifying thing which lumbered cruelly forward under its own power. Maybe there weren’t people who did it; maybe the Holocaust did itself.
But Wiesel can’t be saying that, surely, because he’s said the opposite! In 1999, Wiesel was tapped — in a particularly savvy move by the Clinton administration — to give a speech backing their intervention in Kosovo to prevent the Albanian genocide, and there, he says the following:
Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.
Combating this indifference — combating, really, the notion that the Holocaust was this inevitable happening which individuals cannot shape or reason about, and instead encouraging an idea of individual agency, of action or inaction as choice — was much of his life’s work. He wanted people to think about how they might abet such things. And yet we’re left with his abominable, limp prose, which removes the notion of choice from anyone. Consider this, where three prisoners, including a young and undeserving boy, are put to death.
The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.
"Long live liberty!" shouted the two men. But the boy was silent.
"Where is merciful God, where is He?" someone behind me was asking.
At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.
Total silence in the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting.
Orwell calls out this sort of use of passive voice in Politics and the English Language. He’s generally concerned with political rot (of the Soviet persuasion, but that’s a story for another time) eating at meaning until only the bones are left, and this sort of action-without-actor is one of his many targets.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called “pacification.” Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called “transfer of population” or “rectification of frontiers". People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called “elimination of unreliable elements”. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
And given that all of those examples are of political actors hiding atrocities they’ve committed, it’s extremely odd that Wiesel is doing the same thing. But how else is one to handle the nooses “placed around their necks,” the chairs “tipped over” by no one? A good part of the horror of the Holocaust is the fact that people did it! We spent a few good years directly after the war to ensure that it was, in fact, normal people who did it — that the Germans weren’t a uniquely amoral cancer on the face of the species! That was the purpose of the Milgram experiment, however nonreplicatable it may be! It’s the purpose of one of my favorite Holocaust novels, Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, in which an American expat becomes divorced from the notion that his actions could have consequences, and thus becomes the primary mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda during the war without believing any of it, and deciding that his actions didn’t cause any harm because of that lack of belief. The chief question posed by the Holocaust is how we can prevent another from happening, and in order to prevent another we have to understand what little aberration in our psychology let it ever happen at all. Wiesel cannot dodge this question — and yet he does! He leaves us either with cardboard cutout villains, whose evil is beyond question and thus who cannot be understood as similar to the average person — or with non-persons who invisibly perpetuate genocide, who the reader can skip over.
It’s important to note, in the interest of fairness, that Wiesel is a religious man, and clearly wanted to consider the role of the divine in his experience, so he spends much of the text casting his eyes upward, rather than examining, say, the moral cowardice of a German 17-year-old who marched him further down the road. Here’s the most effective instance of his religious agonies from the text, from when he chooses not to fast on Yom Kippur:
I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.
And I nibbled on my crust of bread. Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening.
This isn’t bad at all as a depiction of his internal struggle with God — and yet, notice the absence of the people starving him. Wiesel tells his story as if it was handed down to him from the divine without intermediaries. This isn’t an artifact of the quotes I’ve chosen, either. Consider this excerpt, in which an SS officer shoots a starving prisoner for reaching for soup.
For a second, he seemed to be looking at himself in the soup, looking for his ghostly reflection there. Then, for no apparent reason, he let out a terrible scream, a death rattle such as I had never heard before and, with open mouth, thrust his head toward the still steaming liquid. We jumped at the sound of the shot. Falling to the ground, his face stained by the soup, the man writhed a few seconds at the base of the cauldron, and then he was still.
There are no actors except the prisoners. There is a shot, but no mention of the man who fired the gun; no description of the prisoners looking with horror towards him, then away, for fear they would be next. No description of — what would he look like? Gleeful? Abstracted? As empty of meaning as a blank wall, or shadow? The SS officers haunt the text: shaping it, but they are unmistakably absent. Why do human beings commit atrocities? Wiesel prefers not to ask, and dismisses the notion of human agency in doing so.
And it is a shame, because asking could strengthen his questions about God. Other writers have managed to capture both: the way that the creator must be cruel to have made us so, and the capacity of the individual for violence. Consider the following excerpt from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy:
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
McCarthy, here, is talking about God perpetuating cycles of violence — of God’s clear approval, or at least ambivalence, towards humanity’s savagery. He takes the raw material of suffering, and uses it to forge a story about the creatures we are. That’s not the only explanation that can be wrought from our history, but at least McCarthy gives us one.
To be clear: I am not saying that Wiesel needed to be a once-in-a-generation stylist to speak about the atrocity that destroyed his life. But I can speak to the efficacy of his work — I am allowed to look at the tale he told us, and what we can take away from it. I am allowed to look at his failures with language, and see how they weaken his mission; I am allowed to notice the omissions of the narrative, and note the misgotten ideas they imply. And I am allowed to regret that there isn’t more to the text; that Wiesel wasn’t more ambitious or accusatory or capable. I just — I wish he allowed himself anger, or a more complicated grief, or knew how to express either; that he could give us a takeaway rather than the suffering.
When describing Night’s purpose, Wiesel states the following:
In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer—or my life, period—would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.
After I finished rereading the text, but before I began my work on my material for my course*,* I went for a walk. It was in February, and I remember a cold wind running through me. I wasn’t unshaken; I’d been shaken more, though, by other work, but I knew the text would be affecting for my students, who know little. The Holocaust was retrenched in my memory, despite it being easy to forget about in our daylight hours. Night did, then, what Wiesel wanted it to do. It was useful.
And is that use sufficient to dismiss its other failings? I don’t know. I’m still going to teach it, and it will still be a part of our conversation about the Holocaust, and the world, and ourselves. Its misbegotten conceptions of agency will likely be maladaptive to the few students who notice; its conclusions less powerful, perhaps, than another book’s might be. But it’s honest, and memetically useful, and if I didn’t feel the horror I ought to have felt, or the grief — so be it. I’ll return to Wilde here; I’ll let it be a testimony, rather than art. Night, after all, never alleged to be anything else.