T.E. W. (terez93) reviewed on 6/5/2021 + 323 more book reviews

As many other readers have noted, this volume, which brings together the three first works of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, exists only on account of the fact that these are his first three works. Subsequent writings fill in considerable gaps in sequence and substance. The first novel herein included is his immortal indictment of the German extermination machine, followed by two works of fiction. It's a somewhat unlikely compilation: however closely they are drawn from real life, the second novels only hint at the aftermath of the scale of devastation, when survivors are attempting to put together shattered lives, and sometimes, as in his works, become the monster themselves. In hindsight, there are many more groupings which would have made more sense, in either time period, or genre (fiction/non), but any accessibility of Wiesel's writings is a victory, if it impels humanity to read them.

The first novel, his immortal "Night," recounts the Wiesel family's deportation from Transylvania, following Germany's occupation of Hungary in March, 1944. The German war machine then began a systematic campaign of mass murder. Wiesel was fifteen at the time of his arrival to Auschwitz, but was told upon arrival to lie about his age and to inform the authorities that he was eighteen - advice he took, which probably ultimately saved his life. His mother and younger sister were reportedly immediately sent to the gas chamber, but his two older sisters miraculously survived, and the three siblings were eventually reunited. Wiesel's father survived until nearly the end of the war, but tragically died of dysentery at Buchenwald, after surviving a brutal death march through the snow, which claimed an untold number of lives. The camp was liberated by the US army on April 11, 1045, in the face of yet another "evacuation," which never came.

Wiesel's account of the unimaginable horror was among the first descriptions of the full scale of the Holocaust to reach a truly global audience. It has since been published in more than thirty languages. The account is fairly short, but damning. It is not only a description of atrocities beyond description, but, more poignantly, it is an exploration of the nature of man, after more than a decade of contemplation and introspection in the wake of his experiences in the death camps. It was written in 1960, after Wiesel had had time to contemplate his experiences as a teenager.

It tells the tragic account of not only the loss of home and family, but the loss of self, a loss of faith, in both God and humanity. One of the more famous passages reads: "the student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me." Many other authors have expressed a similar sentiment, that they were, in fact, not survivors at all: they simply did not die. This is a common theme reflected in the words of those who experienced the camps, including other famous authors such as Primo Levi, who expressed a similar skepticism that humanity had really moved past what had been inflicted by the Germans. Nearly a century after these tragic events began to unfold, one can still reasonably question whether humanity has changed much since those tragic events, as many other examples of widespread genocide have occurred since.

Coming to terms with his experiences was a struggle Wiesel contended with all his life. His writings were his therapy: in the US, he wrote more than forty books, and co-founded a magazine in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his tireless activism. Wiesel devoted his life to bearing witness to the suffering and death he experienced as a teenager, to ensure that the world would never forget. Let's hope it never does. That tragic possibility is a genuine concern, now that so many firsthand witnesses are no longer with us, due to the inevitable march of time. In the decades to come, the words of survivors, and occasionally of victims, such as Anne Frank, along with the camps themselves, the detritus of mass murder, silent witnesses to those dark days, will be all that remain.

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You mustn't be afraid of the dark... Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desires to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

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