A Holocaust Survivor’s Primer On Life
The book Night and Fog by Arne Brun Lie is another memoir of a holocaust survivor but it is different than many of its predecessors because it is more than a chronicle and painful detailing of the horrors and atrocities inflicted upon the victims of the Nazi Holocaust during the 1940s. Interweaving his experiences as a prisoner of the Nazi camps and his personal sea voyage from Boston to Norway to revisit the beloved land where the Nazis abducted him from, Lie’s book represents a metaphor for gaining meaning out of life, a metaphor that is mixed with waves of agony and joy as much as his boat rides the waves of turmoil and calm of the sea. Through it all we are left with humor, optimism and the appreciation of life, even though the sea journey represents Lie’s personal exploration of the horrors, atrocities and tortures inflicted upon him and his friends and fellow prisoners by the Nazis.
The author’s purpose in writing the book was not only an attempt to ease his own personal demons and nightmares internalized within him from his camp days, but the book also serves as a manual for how to survive life which can be as black, meaningless and hopeless at times as the days Lie spent in the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) of the camps. To a large degree Lie’s book is like an existential primer for surviving life’s negative aspects, especially his “will to live” that he maintains throughout his days in the camp primarily because of his all-consuming “dream” he used as a shield against the Nazi horrors, “We all needed a lifeline to help us hang on to ourselves. For me, the lifeline was dreams…dreams of sailing” (p. 12). The author thanks Elie Wiesel in his acknowledgement, but the books Wiesel have written seem to focus on his and others survival of pain and torture without placing it in a larger context of living each day able to find some kind of meaning in a world t...