Night |
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26 July 2024
Elie Wiesel, like most authors giving first hand accounts of it, survived the Holocaust. Thus his book Night is unsurprisingly hopeful in the face of overwhelming human cruelty. We like to think of such human cruelty as an abberration, but history teaches us the opposite: that peace and kindness are the abberration. Wiesel made it through almost to liberation by the Americans with his father. His father did not make it. Keeping his father alive though kept Wiesel alive. Viktor Frankl, another holocaust survivor, wrote extensively about how having a purpose kept people alive in the camps. I cannot but think of my own experience at my father's side during his last weeks. Wiesel touches on the complicated relationship between fathers and sons a number of times and how his own filial piety is often aspirational rather than actual. In the book the holocaust at times seems merely a backdrop to this story of a son and father. The Nazis could have been Aztecs or Romans or Khymer Rouge or countless other terrible humans, but the kernal of the story - son and father - would have remained the same. In my own lifetime Tahir Izgil has recounted his experiences in the Uigher genocide commited by the Chinese. In the face of the worst of humanity in Birkenau and Auschwitz, Wiesel chooses also to show us its best in the caring relationship of a father and son.
