Elie Wiesel's "Night"

Elie Wiesel, in Night, his story of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, paints a picture of such horror that he ends his book seeing himself as a living corpse. The thesis of this study is that Wiesel's book only tells part of the story of the death camp survivors. Other sources will show the rest of the story. In fact, Wiesel himself has become a spokesperson for survivors and has shown that there is, indeed, life after the death camps.

Wiesel was a teenager in the Nazi death camps. He was in several of the camps, lost his family, and finally was rescued by Allied soldiers. Even after being rescued, Wiesel almost died after being accidentally poisoned by bad food:

I was transferred to the hospital and spent two weeks between life and death. One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me (109).

Some might think that Wiesel would want to forget what happened to him in the death camps. Wiesel, however, knows that he and the world must never forget what happened. He will remember in honor to those who died there, and he will remember so that it will not happen again. Or at least that is what survivors would hope. The truth is that the same thing---on a smaller scale---is happening in the former Yugoslavia today. Perhaps i

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, reading about it, and studying it. . . . Understanding the past enables us to build a better future. . . . Learning about [such horrors] can help to prevent [them] (108; 110). Wiesel's book is just such an effort to awaken others to the horrors that human beings can do to other human beings. As Rossel writes, if we see the Nazis as creatures who are not human beings, then we will fool ourselves into thinking that it cannot happen again. We must keep in mind that the Nazis were not special creatures of evil, but were in fact human beings, just like our neighbors, just like ourselves. We all have evil within ourselves, and if we forget that then we will make the same mistakes the Germans made in following Hitler. Rossel writes that God said to Cain when Cain was jealous of his brother: "Evil waits for you by the door, but, if you want, you can defeat it" (112). Of course, one must first recognize evil as evil if one is going to defeat it. The Germans refused to see evil as evil, and they were led step by step to believe that the Jews and others were not human beings and that they themselves---the Germans---were superior. As Rossel writes: Evil is never very far away. It is just outside the door, just around the corner. it is e

Category: Literature - E