Symposium on Night

I want to thank Alan Zuckerman for his path breaking column in the last edition of these pages. I don’t mean his public disagreement with Yehuda Lev. I’ve already done that. No, it was his decision to promote programs at his schul. Twice, within his allotted 750 words. I’ll see if I can break that record today in urging readers to trek down to remotest Bristol, a half-an-hour’s drive south.

At Roger Williams University we celebrate with a campus wide series of lectures and discussions books whose “special” anniversary is being observed. This year it’s Elie Wiesel’s Night. To most readers of this newspaper Night is probably a familiar text, but on a campus not heavily populated by Jewish students it is an opening into a world of horror unmatched in human history.

In the fall semester a colleague and I taught a one credit course on the book and its two sequels—if sequels they be as each has a different main character, a different locale, and a different texture. The three books are Night, Dawn, and Day. From the titles one might intuit a gradually increasing sense of wellness, hope, faith. And one would be wrong. Descent into ever lower realms of Shoah is Wiesel’s itinerary. Night is a memoir of a young boy caught up in the holocaust, shipped to Auschwitz and then as the liberating Soviet army moves inexorably westward, forced to traverse Poland and Germany on a death march that made life in the camp seem almost bearable. By the end, all of Wiesel’s family has been lost, as has his faith. When prisoners see a young boy hung from a gallows, one asks, where is God in this camp? And the answer is to point to the dead child; that’s Him, there. God is dead. At one point Wiesel comments that he prayed to the God he no longer believed in.

Dawn reverses the roles. The young protagonist is an Irgun or Stern Gang guerilla. One of his comrades is captured in a raid on British stores and is sentenced to hang on a date certain at dawn. In retaliation, Jews kidnap a British officer and hold him as ransom for the return of their comrade. The narrator, haunted by the images of his family, all dead, all judging him, is assigned to be the executioner of the British officer, a man with a child his own age. Realizing that he now is in the position of the Nazis who had control over his life and death, the young man awaits with dread the coming of dawn to fulfill his gruesome obligation, uncertain that he can. Whether he will actually shoot, or not, is the tension the reader feels until the last page.

It doesn’t get better in Day. The new protagonist is in New York, a UN reporter. He has a girl friend but cannot love. Wracked with existential doubts he can find no purpose in his life. One night he is struck by a cab as he crosses Times Square and nearly killed. Was it an unconscious suicide attempt? We are left to wonder, but not for long. He feels guilt—not for what he did in the camps, but for what he did not do—die, like all the others. Why did he survive? To what end, if he is only a hollow shell of a man without a soul?

As I say, there is no hope, no redemption in these books of the holocaust and what its impact on its survivors.

From February 4 until March 15 there will be an exhibit in the main library (which I’ve suggested calling “Stein Hall” but so far no one has taken me up on my suggestion). Featured objects will be Jewish items from before and during the Holocaust, books, papers, a Torah scroll confiscated by the Nazis for use in a proposed museum of the destroyed race. I’ve been tapped to give a lecture on Hitler and the Jews on February 6 (3:00 pm); my colleague and I will lead a book discussion on Night for Honors Program students (and anyone else who wishes to join us) on February 7 at 5:00 pm in the Library. The keynote address will be delivered on February 13 at 3:00 pm by Professor James E. Young of the University of Massachusetts who will speak on “50 Years of Night: Between History and Memory.” All events are free and open to the public. Come join us.