Ken Waltzer on Elie Wiesel's 'Night'

Soon after one of her Book Club selections, a memoir by James Frey, was revealed to be fiction rather than faithful recollection, Oprah Winfrey announced that Elie Wiesel's memoir of his Holocaust experience, "Night," would be her next Book Club choice.

"Night" is an authentic and faithful recollection of Wiesel's experience at Auschwitz and at Buchenwald that originally appeared in 1958. It is an important Holocaust memoir, a key testimony. Yet we should not be surprised that even a memoir like "Night" is somewhat selective in its retelling. Writer Naomi Seidman has described how the text was transformed as Wiesel rewrote and shortened it from the original Yiddish, "Un di velt hot geshvign," to the subsequent French, "La nuit" I want to offer additional observations based on research for a book I am writing called "The Rescue of Children at Buchenwald."

"Night" focuses primarily on the relationship of a father and son who, ripped by the Nazis in mid-1944 from their home in Sighet, Romania, were taken to Auschwitz and to Buna, where they labored as prisoners until January 1945. Both were forced on a death march, and then were sent to Buchenwald, arriving January 26. When Wiesel loses his father three days later, after they have been inducted into Buchenwald, Wiesel drifts in "Night" into a listlessness and fog from which (we know from his later autobiography) he emerged only after liberation. Wiesel recalls thereafter in "Night"only the terrible final days of the camp, in early April 1945, when the Nazis sought first to evacuate Jewish prisoners and then to take all prisoners out together. He was too weak at liberation on April 11 to leave his barracks (hence he was photographed in a famous picture in the barracks on April 12 or 13), and he came to understand he was free only days later.   

In his autobiography, "All Rivers Run to the Sea" (1995), Wiesel writes that he recalls some time in which he mechanically played chess in the barracks and a Passover service and not much else before the liberation. In "Night" his focus as a writer is primarily on his relation with his father, the presence or absence of God during this ordeal, and his own survival as a person alone and its meaning. He becomes alone and feels alone after his father's death, for this death, he has said many times, also extinguished a part of himself.  Writing in this fashion, Wiesel fails to address clearly in "Night" the social context of his existence during the final months of his captivity. The barracks, his place in the camp and his relation to others—other prisoners, Jews, boys—all remain murky save for a brief statement: "I was transferred to the children’s block, where there were six hundred of us."

What is omitted or slighted in "Night" is that during the final months at Buchenwald, the 16-year old Wiesel was assigned to a special barracks that was created and maintained by the clandestine underground resistance in the camp as part of a strategy of saving youths. This block, Block 66, was located in the deepest part of the disease-infested little camp, a separate space below the main camp at Buchenwald that was beyond the normal Nazi SS gaze (the local SS officer actively cooperated and conducted appels inside the barracks). 

The barracks was overseen by block elder Antonin Kalina, a Czech Communist from Prague, and his deputy, Gustav Schiller, a Polish-Jewish Communist originally from Lvov. Odon Gati, a Communist from Budapest, was stubendienst. Schiller, who appears briefly in "Night," was a father figure and mentor, especially for the Polish-Jewish boys and many of the Czech-Jewish boys, but he was less liked, and even feared, by Hungarian- and Romanian-Jewish boys, especially religious boys, including Wiesel. He appears in "Night" as a menacing figure, armed with a truncheon.

After late January 1945, the underground concentrated all children and youths who could be fit into this windowless barracks—more than 600 children and youth, mostly Jews—and sheltered and protected them. Younger children, like Israel Meir Lau (Lulek) from Piotrkow, later the Chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel, not yet 8 years old, and several others were secreted in Block 8 in the main camp and watched by German and Russian prisoners there. Still others, as young as 4 years old, including Josef Shleifstein of Sandomierz and Stefan Jerzy Zweig (Juschu) of Cracow, were hidden elsewhere throughout the camp. When General George Patton's Third United States Army arrived on April 11, 1945, more than 900 children and youth—mostly teenagers, but also younger boys—were discovered among the 21,000 emaciated prisoners. They were alive in part due to a remarkable effort by key elements in the Communist-led underground to assist them to survive until liberation.

Elie Wiesel has acknowledged the role played by the clandestine underground and political prisoners in saving children and youth at Buchenwald, especially in his autobiography, but he did not attend to this in "Night." It was not his purpose or focus in that book. Many of his fellow barracks members, however, who are still alive and remember very well their days and nights in Block 66; their relations with Kalina, Schiller and others; and the hope provided to them there, have been helping fill in the story. Wiesel has generously offered assistance himself.

In this barracks, these survivors recall being protected and sheltered from work, save for occasional forays to clean up after bombing raids in nearby Weimar, where they scavenged for food. They recall extra food in Red Cross packages distributed to them from Danish and other political prisoners in the main camp. They recall efforts by their mentors to raise their horizons in the barracks—songs, stories, even history and math lessons—to convince them there was another world awaiting them. And they recall heroic intervention by Kalina and Schiller during the final days to protect them from being led out when the Nazis sought to clear Jews from the camp.

Many of the boys, despite all that was done for them, were nonetheless marched to the main gate on April 10 and lined up to be marched out. Wiesel says this in "Night": "So we were massed in the huge assembly square in rows of five, waiting to see the gate open." However, American airplanes flew overhead, sirens sounded, the guards ran to the shelters, and Kalina, who marched with them, ordered the boys back to the barracks. They were still there the next afternoon when advanced armored units of the Third Army drove SS guards from the camp towers, the resistance took control, and Americans arrived inside Buchenwald.

Even authentic memoirs are selective, crafted around fragments or pieces of memory, and related in ways shaped by the writer's purpose. It is to be hoped that new attention to Wiesel’s experience and survival at Buchenwald may now also include appreciation of this social and political dimension—that the solitary figure was not alone, though he surely and deeply felt so; he was among hundreds of children and youth rescued or aided by a purposeful effort by elements of the clandestine resistance. In "Night," Wiesel says that when he viewed himself in a mirror after liberation, he saw a corpse gazing back at him. But another picture taken after liberation on April 17, when the boys were led to the former SS barracks outside the camp, shows Wiesel marching out, fourth on the left, among a phalanx of youth moving together, heads held high, a group together guided by prisoners who had helped save them.

 

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