I’m a little embarrassed to say that I just read Elie Wiesel’s mega-best-selling Holocaust memoir Night for the first time. I have spent countless hours reading through hundreds of Holocaust histories, memoirs, legal testimonies, and recorded interviews over the last year and a half as I’ve been working on my next book, yet, somehow, I never bothered to read Night, which, for many, is the foundational (and/or only) foray into Holocaust literature.
So, this week, as I’m trying to wrap up my final manuscript revisions, I finally did it. I read Night.
My take? Honestly?
Disappointed.
Of course, it has everything that one would expect from a Holocaust memoir: rancor against Nazis, heartbreaking scenes of family separation, terrifying images from the chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and more death than any one person, let alone a teen at the time, should ever have had to witness, including the death of his own father right as the war neared its end.
Yet, there is so much missing.
I don’t want to fault Wiesel (z”l) himself, not really, at least. In his introduction to the updated 2006 second edition, Wiesel makes a key point that is easy to miss:
“Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now, that his testimony would not be received.”
From the first manuscript of the book, written in Yiddish shortly after the war, to the Oprah’s Book Club-version that exists today, Wiesel says, there are many people who simply don’t want to hear what a Jewish Shoah survivor has to say to the world. He goes on to reference – obliquely, at least – how much of the original story had to be cut out in order for publishers to take any interest. It’s something Dara Horn elaborates on in her book People Love Dead Jews – the original Yiddish version is 800+ pages of fire, anger, and a hopelessness in humanity; not just in the political party that perpetrated the Holocaust, but in all the by-standers who let it happen. The non-Jewish neighbors who turned them in and then looted their homes; the Hungarian police for their role in the round-ups; the violence toward Jews that often prevented the survivors from returning to their homes; the perverse, pervasive ways in which communities were so receptive to anti-Jewish laws and ideologies that things were even able to escalate to the point that they did: the fact that there were no consequences for most of these people enrages young Wiesel.
In the commercially-successful version, though, this has all been edited out and replaced with Wiesel’s (understandable) sense of anger toward a god who could let this happen.
While I don’t doubt that that anger was real or justified, Horn’s point is that it is a lot more pleasant for readers to work through his religious angst than his anger at fellow humans who murdered 6 million Jews and/or who benefitted from it and then faced no backlash. Any historical sense of Jews as a people who were marginalized, persecuted, and murdered for their race at a specific historical moment is essentially gone.
It’s also worth mentioning that – for a number of reasons, some more complicated than others – Night also lacks a level of gore, for lack of a better term, than many other survivor accounts. I’m not encouraging war-crimes porn just for shock value, but so many other first-hand accounts – especially those that discuss Auschwitz-Birkenau – emphasize the scale of death, pain, fear, and trauma that survivors witnessed. None of these has achieved anything close to the commercial or popular success as Night.
Night does contain a few frightening scenes from inside Birkenau, the dedicated death camp at the Auschwitz complex, but young Wiesel and his father were “lucky,” to use the memoir’s own words, that they were assigned to a “good Kommando” at an electrical warehouse, where the work was not as excessively dangerous or as exhausting as some of the other work assignments were. To be sure, the endpoint for all Jews who entered the complex was eventual death, but it is also true that some Kommandos, blocks, capos, etc., were worse than others. The subjects of my current work-in-progress, for instance, were sent straight to the “Death Block” of Birkenau, where camp commanders didn’t even bother tattooing or registering the prisoners, since they were just waiting their turn for the gas chambers. Their account of Auschwitz is very different than the one featured in Night.
This is not to make light of one person’s experience over another, or to play misery Olympics among the victims. However, as I write about at length in my current project, when “tidy” accounts like Wiesel’s are the only ones that become widely-read bestsellers, it gives a false impression of what the “average” – so to speak – Jewish experience was during the Holocaust.
In fact, one could make a similar argument about the subject of my book: 90% of Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and I’ve seen estimates that upwards of 95% of Jews from her town, Brzeziny, were killed. A similar statistic exists for Auschwitz-Birkenau in particular. Historians estimate that of the 1.1 million Jews transported there, one million were killed on camp grounds, mostly in the gas chambers. How can any survivor’s story, then, truly represent the average experience there when the average experience was death?
I’m not the first one to wonder these things (in my book, I take on a methodology that I hopes re-centers holocaust narratives on the true victims, not just those who miraculously survived), but they are the kinds of issues that just left me wanting more from a Holocaust memoir that has won the Nobel Peace Prize and sold over 10 million copies worldwide.
I don’t think the blame lies with Wiesel, but with a publishing industry, and maybe even readers, who assume – rightly or wrongly – that they can’t (or don’t want to) address the full scale of race-based violence and death that the world allowed to happen to Europe’s Jews.
With everything that is happening in the American news cycle right now (…my phone is pinging with disturbing highlights from RFK’s confirmation hearing as I’m typing this…) I almost feel silly spending so much time on this one book review.
BUT, given the political posturing seen at various International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies this past Monday (and who can forget the blatant Nazi salutes we all have had to re-watch ad nauseum since last Monday), it also feels relevant, somehow.
Real facts matter. The whole truth matters. Learning about the history – the full history – of race-, class-, gender-, and anti-Queer-based violence matters. If nothing else, Elon’s “awkward gesture” (fuck you, ADL…) and subsequent horrific jokes about the Holocaust make this feel even more timely.
As the original, unedited, Yiddish version of Night says:
“And now, scarcely ten years after Buchenwald, I realize that the world forgets quickly...War criminals stroll through the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past seems to have been erased, relegated to oblivion…Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.”
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