Change and Variety in Elie Wiesel’s Depictions of His Time in the Camps
I woke up at dawn on January 29. On my father’s cot there lay another sick person. They must have taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing... No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...”
(Elie Wiesel: All Rivers Run to the Sea. Memoirs, Vol. One 1928–1969 (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 93–94.)
(Elie Wiesel: All Rivers Run to the Sea. Memoirs, Vol. One 1928–1969 (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 84.)
(Elie Wiesel: All Rivers Run to the Sea. Memoirs, Vol. One 1928–1969 (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 87–88.)
(Elie Wiesel: All Rivers Run to the Sea. Memoirs, Vol. One 1928–1969 (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 93–94.)
The portrayal of the protagonist, Eliezer, in Elie Wiesel’s first-hand account La Nuit (1958, Engl. Night, 1960) is characterized by an unsparing bluntness with respect to the image that emerges of the boy in the camp. All his religious doubts, his feelings of guilt, his feelings toward his father—who represents for him not only a stable point of reference, but in some situations on the death march a burden as well—are revealed to the readers. They lead Eliezer into moral conflicts with himself, with his wishes and thoughts, with the extent to which he allows them to affect his behavior. Readers are confronted with insoluble questions about the “right” way to behave in the camp. This is especially clear in the scene describing his father’s death in Buchenwald: his father is beaten again by an SS man, while Eliezer keeps still because he is afraid of also receiving a blow.
In the first volume of his autobiography, Tous les fleuves vont à la mer (1994, Engl. All Rivers Run to the Sea, 1995), Elie Wiesel once again describes the death of his father, a scene that has stayed with him throughout his life. Now the portrayal has a different focus: he could do nothing more for his father at the time, and he was beaten himself.
Over the course of Night, Eliezer, who was a zealous student of the Talmud and Kabbalah in Sighet and came to the camp as a strictly devout Hasid, rebels against God. On Rosh Hashanah, he refuses to pray, for example, because he sees no reason to bless God in light of what is taking place in front of him. He does not repudiate his faith, however, but rebels against God from within his faith in a gesture reminiscent of Job,[1] wrangling with God, accusing Him of allowing the Jews to suffer terribly, and asking why. Likewise, he depicts the fate of other religious Jews who lose their faith and thus their will to live in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp.
“‘For God's sake, where is God?’
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:[4]
‘Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…’”[5]
Thus the image of a Jesus-like victim emerges, but at the same time it is unclear whether this is to be interpreted as an expression of being utterly abandoned by God, or as a sign that He is, after all, with “His Jews” and suffering too.
In “Darkness,” the second chapter of All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel once again gives an account of his life during the Holocaust. Now a great deal of space is devoted to the final days in Sighet and the deportation, and only relatively little can be learned there about the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp and its terrible daily routine, the daily deaths, in marked contrast to Night. Instead, large parts of this chapter of the autobiography are a reflection on Auschwitz—starting with the consequences of Elie Wiesel’s experiences there for his faith. Here he reports that he and his father, too, had tried in the camp to recite all the prayers, and that talking about the religious tradition had kept Elie from losing his will to live. A Polish rabbi is said to have failed to survive the camp precisely because he fasted on Yom Kippur, that is, obeyed the commandments.
Comparing these two stylings of his memories, one gets the impression that the Elie Wiesel of the 1950s felt the need for such a rebellion even more intensely, so intensely that in Night it became instrumental for the reactions of his character Eliezer to the events in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp. In 1994, the Jewish religion and the vitality of its traditions and commandments seem to have a determining value once again for the writer Elie Wiesel. Rebellion no longer has a formative influence on the presentation of his memories. It becomes evident that the changing life situation of the survivor—“the survivor continues to live and, in living, to change”[6]—leads to changes in the configuration of Wiesel’s memories of the time in the camp. In retrospect, in his autobiography Wiesel himself assigns a special validity to the “literarized” account as testimony to what he experienced in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp:
“My intent here is not to repeat what I recounted in Night but to review that testimony as I see it now. Was I explicit enough? Did I miss what was essential? Did I serve memory well? In fact, if I had it to do over again, I would change nothing in my deposition.”[7]
(MN; transl. KL)