WFHermans
04-03-2006, 03:34 PM
Night
A Review Of Elie Wiesel's Bad Acid Trip
3/14/2004 11:07:25 PM
Bill White
Book Review -- I just finished reading Elie Wiesel’s book Night. The only way I can describe it as a mix between silly and goofy. I think if everyone had to read the first thirty or so pages of it – the bit with the crazy Jewish prophetess screaming about flames – that the Holocaust story would have been laughed out of the collective consciousness of Jew influenced mankind long ago. Reading it at first was entertaining – a bit like Kafka, another crazy Jew – then a bit boring, and then, as I reflected and realized that this was meant as a work of non-fiction, and was accepted seriously as such by some people, almost as surreal as the text itself.
The book’s story is ridiculous and poorly constructed. The beginning is intriguing, though, because it is so surreal. If this work were to start “Someone must have been telling lies about Elie W., because he woke up one day to find himself in Auschwitz”, it would have been a fitting beginning. The main literary trouble with the book is that Wiesel pulls back from the surreal after leaving Auschwitz and decides to just lie instead – making for a much less interesting read.
The book starts with Wiesel as a Jewish boy devoted to God in his village. A group of “foreign Jews” are taken from the village by train to another country and machine-gunned. Why the Germans would have taken these Jews to another country by train to machinegun them when they could have been machine- gunned perfectly well at home is not explained. One of these Jews, a Jewish mystic named Moche, survives being machine gunned because he lays in a dirty pit with corpses three days with a leg wound. The obvious – that if you were lie three days in a dirty pit with corpses three days with a bullet-related leg wound you would get gangrene and die – is ignored. Moche then walks, with a leg mutilated badly enough by a bullet that he was mistaken for dead, back to his village to see Elie and warn Elie of coming atrocities.
The fact that Moche is a Jewish mystic and Elie is an advanced Talmudic student is the foundation on which the larger mystical theme of the book is based – as if Wiesel was anticipated Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ style of magical realism. The world in which Elie exists is one in which the basic laws of physics and human behavior can be suspended to express things which the author believes are more real than reality itself. This places Wiesel’s work squarely in the realm of fiction, alongside authors like Kafka (a master of the style) and Marquez (whose ability to place words in close enough proximity that some humans can derive meaning from them while simultaneously being non- white has earned him a number of prizes.)
Moche’s atrocity stories are amusing. In particular, the assertion that he sees babies thrown into the air for machine gun practice I found peculiar, given that I often shoot trap, and have fired automatic weapons, and know that it would be very difficult, not to mention unsafe, to toss a baby in the air in such a way that one could meaningfully target it with a machine gun. In fact, the description invoked, in me, the image of a trap (like a trap- shooting trap) whose arm flung around to toss babies in the air – very funny. It was one of the first bouts of laughter the book really brought out in me.
Elie’s personal journey begins when the Hungarian fascists invite the German military in and the Germans take control of his village. I do not know what historical reality there may be to these events. However, Wiesel, near the end of 1944, is rounded up by the Germans, first into a ghetto, and then deported by cattle car to Poland.
The account of Wiesel’s deportation is peculiar. First, he speaks in praise of the ghetto, because it was administered by Jews, and a general Zionist undercurrent flows beneath his overall mystical-religious theme. His use of foreshadowing in the book, not only of events to occur later in the text, but of historical events to occur after the text’s conclusion – the founding of the Zionist Entity and the beginning of the occupation of Palestine, in particular – is one of the few skillfully implemented literary devices in the work. One wonders if his editors suggested it.
The Hungarian police and the “fascists” round up the ghetto street by street, and the Jews willingly give up their possessions and their houses with almost no resistance. This image of the weak and passive Jew strikes one as more of a literary device designed to bring out the author’s message than as a historical accounting of fact. Wiesel plays to Jewish stereotypes to emphasize his Zionist message, which is that the passivity of Jews has been key in breaking their relationship with and causing their abandonment by God. Again, a sense of “magical realism” pervades.
In the cattle cars, the Jews continue to remain passive, even as their gold and their money are stripped from them, and they are left without adequate food, clothing or other necessities. On the journey, a Jewish woman, a mystic of some sort, begins to have visions, and begins to scream about “flames” and the coming destruction of the Jews by fire. The other Jews ignore her and eventually beat her to make her shut up. What is peculiar about this episode is that there does not appear to have been any attempt on the part of the author to make the reader believe it was a literally real event – the use of it in the development of the literary theme is obvious and almost disingenuous – yet the book itself is categorized as autobiographical, as if the events described were meant to reflect literal reality. It is during the rantings of the Jewish mystic that even a slow reader is forced to notice that they are reading a work of fiction; the fact that there are those who do not recognize the book as such, or that there was a time when the book was not widely recognized as such, gives the current reality itself a surreal air.
The arrival at Auschwitz is the last event in the “magically real” portion of the narrative, after which the book devolves into the more mundanely untrue. The Jews, arriving at Auschwitz in their imaginary cattle car, cluster to the window to see an equally imaginary chimney belching imaginary smoke and flame. This is the fire that the Jewish mystic warned about, and if the narrative were to end with it consuming Elie and his fellow Jews, this novelette would end a well crafted and entertaining short story.
But it is not to be so. Elie’s family is separated and he and his father are sent in one direction, while the women are sent the other. While with his father, the other Jews warn them and the other prisoners that they are to be cast into the flaming pit. One wonder if the “flaming pit” is not a literary metaphor for Hell or the Jewish Gehenna. One is given a mental image of darkened skies and a ground alive in flame – a bit like a level from the computer game “Doom”. Elie and his father march off with the prisoners to a position closer to the pit, where Elie sees a truck drive up which is full of babies -- needless to say that is a peculiar thing for a truck to be full of, one wonders how they were packaged. Elie then says the truck (apparently unaided by human hands), dumps the children into the flaming pit before his eyes. One presumes, then, that this was a dump truck, which begs the question of how the children were loaded into it in the first place, unless they were dropped from a platform. One also wonders if this is not meant as a literary metaphor for the destruction of Jewish youth by the effects of the horror of the war; if so, it would have more credibility than as a literal description of some imagined atrocity.
Elie, his father and the rest of the Jewish cabal are marched towards the pit, with the belief that they are to be marched all the way in. Again, this scene only makes literary sense if the pit is a metaphor; to believe that there was some literal flaming pit that they were to be marched into is nonsense, as is the belief that a group of Jews would walk towards it with merely verbal orders. For anyone who has been near a large fire, Wiesel’s assertion that they walked within two steps of the flame of their own free will is nonsense – it would simply have been too hot for anyone to do such a thing of their own non-physically coerced volition (and the mere implication of a threat when no violence had yet occurred is not sufficient physical coercion).
Wiesel and the cabal are then suddenly stopped before the pit and marched into a barracks, where they are deloused and shipped off to Auschwitz I and then to Buna. It in this part, around page 45 or so, that the book drops its magical realism and becomes a mere false account. It would have been more entertaining – and superior from a literary perspective – if Wiesel had continued the magical reasoning with ever deepening descriptions of violence and torture; instead, his suffering becomes more mundane.
At this point I should insert that his description of prison life overall, and the nature of the lies he tells, suggested to me that Wiesel has never actually been incarcerated. His approach really makes me wonder if he didn’t stitch the alleged concentration camp number he has onto his arm himself, and if anyone can tell me there is any proof that Wiesel ever spent any real time in any concentration camp or other type of incarceration, it would be greatly appreciated.
Because Wiesel’s description of the camps is bland and rather repetitive, I will leave a chronological account of his narrative to describe the overall impression of this portion.
First, Wiesel’s foci are typical of the prisoner – there are complaints about exhaustion, having to work (Wiesel, being a student, had never had to work), and the food being offered. If it can be demonstrated Wiesel has actually been in a camp, and didn’t merely have himself tattooed so he could write books, the time he describes is one when there were general shortages of rations, and his complaints about being underfed and overworked probably would be the perspective typical of a prisoner of the time.
What is most noteworthy about this portion of the account, though, is the number of times that his father dies, which blurs with an overall theme of fear of “selection.”
Wiesel’s father dies at least four or five times because he finally kicks the bucket, and one wonders what the actual truth behind the matter is. I would want to strongly examine the claim that Wiesel’s father was actually in a camp with him (if Wiesel himself were truly in a camp at all) before I could even believe the story that far. Wiesel’s father is really the only remaining literary vestige of the book after Wiesel abandons the magically real opening sequence. The father symbolizes something – what is unclear.
Wiesel describes the constant fear of “selection”, “selection” being selection to be killed. He never mentions gas chambers in conjunction with this – he always states that the fear is either of being cast into the flames – psyche Haidi proaipsen, as Homer might say – or of being shot. Though several characters are hanged in the book, Wiesel seems to have no fear of that. One wonders if the “flames” here are not a continuing metaphor for a more metaphysical danger to his father’s soul (presuming, of course, that, being Jew, Wiesel misperceives the dark void of his Jewish inner being as being soul-like). Given the religious overtones of the book and Wiesel’s constant questioning of God – earlier on Moche has suggested that the questioning of God is the most true form of divine communion – I would tend to see the crematoria as a metaphor and not as intended to be a literal truth, a tendency which preserves the narrative while causing me further deep doubts about the nature of those portions of International Judaism that demand that the facts be brought into accordance with their literature.
Wiesel’s father is “selected” to die multiple times. He is selected to die for being weak in the barracks. After the Germans abandon the camp (leaving chronological order here), he is selected to die by shooting, then by being tossed from a train, then by starvation. In fact, in each case, Wiesel makes such a big deal of his father’s imminent demise that, when his father popped up again still alive, I had to go back and re-read to correct my misunderstanding that the old man had finally popped off. Each rescue is a deus ex machina, indicating an overuse of the technique, if one does not interpret it in the “magically real” world of his father, on the brink of temptation that would damn his soul, coming back to reality.
Near the end of the Banu portion of the narrative, Wiesel injures his foot and is laid up in the hospital ward. Despite constant threats to shoot the weak and the injured, the Germans perform surgery on him for the purpose of nursing him back to health. While his foot, which was cut open to reduce pus, infection, and remove fluids causing swelling, is healing, the Germans decide to abandon the camp and flee with its internees. Wiesel gets up on the injured leg and – not walks, but runs – forty two mile in less than twenty four hours. As in several other places – such as his alleged repeated personal contacts with Dr Mengele – Wiesel’s liberties with truth have no apparent literary meaning and devolve into the simple lie.
Regarding the leg injury, I am reminded of the movie Mountains of the Moon, where Sir Richard Burton, exploring Africa, similarly injured both his feet, and is the recipient of a rude surgery cutting them open to remove the fluids. Burton is carried by natives on a stretcher for several weeks. Unless the Jewish anatomy is much more significantly prejudiced towards regeneration than that of white men – and I see no evidence of that – Mr Wiesel did not run forty two miles on a foot that had been sliced open and drained of fluids only days ago.
And before going to the climactic “journey” portion of the narrative, it is important to note one other major lie – minor ones, like his encounter with the French girl and so forth are so eclipsed by his whoppers to be rendered moot. Mr Wiesel states that he was whipped twenty five times with a bullwhip for the infraction of seeing a “kapo” watching over him have sex. If this is true, Mr Wiesel’s back should still bear the scars of being scourged with a bull whip. I am not totally familiar with the literature regarding him, but I have never heard of him displaying such scars – and one would not think him the type that was inclined to keep such thing private.
When the Russians approach the camp the SS allegedly rounds the prisoners up and forces them to run forty two miles to another camp. Mr Wiesel’s father dies twice – actually three times, including a near death during a stopover after the first day – during this journey. Like the cat the old man appears to have nine lives, and again I wonder if the father existed at all – perhaps he is just a metaphor for Elie’s inner spirit, his faith, or his stamina.
Why the SS would choose to run so far is unclear; one presumes there was no particular reason they couldn’t have taken trucks or motored vehicles. Why the prisoners would chose to go with the Germans instead of await the Russians – and they clearly have the choice – is unclear from Wiesel’s narrative. The literary necessity is that the father isn’t dead yet, and still needs to die; the fact that reality is not driven by literary necessity is ignored.
Upon arrival in the next camp, Gleiwicz, the father dies again, but is restored. There is some scrounging for food. Elie encounters a boy he knows who, despite being stripped naked, forced to work, and forced to run forty two miles through the snow in less than twenty four hours while injured, has survived with his violin. They are crowded into a room so cramped that Elie feels he will literary suffocate because someone is thrown – by who is unclear – on top of him. However, that night, this boy finds the strength and the physical space necessary to play Beethoven on his violin, then dies. I laughed hard, because my mental image was of the HP Lovecraft story – the Music of someone, I forget who – where a man plays his violin frantically to keep the Cthulu horrors at bay, then dies. Wiesel’s account has about as much credibility.
After this, they all board cattle cars again, and the father is about to be thrown from the train as dead, but is restored. There is fighting on the cattle car between fathers and sons over loafs of bread and one wonders if what is being described is not an inner battle between Jews and their faith that is being expressed metaphorically through seemingly “real” events. Wiesel’s attempt, however, to tie this in with a later life experience of a French woman throwing coins to Arabs in Aden suggests, though, that Wiesel wants this story to be seen as literally real – another peculiar manifestation of the Jewish inability to distinguish between their imaginations, thoughts and fantasies, and actual reality.
Elie then ends up in Buchenwald, and the narrative abruptly stops. The father dies. Elie has nothing more to say. One wonders if Wiesel has merely run out of lies to tell, or if what he is describing is the inner spiritual death of his character – manifested in a metaphorical father – after which there is no more reveleation to be had. This story climaxes, but the climax is more of the style of James Joyce’s inner realization style of writing than a proper literary end. The liberation of the camp is a denouement, as untrue as anything else Wiesel writes. In the description of the liberation, Wiesel, in fact, appears to have abandoned any pretense of literary merit and merely written a blaise lie to bring to an end a story that was poorly planned from the beginning.
Wiesel would have been much better off to have cast this book as a work of experimental fiction and continued to develop his magically-real Jewish mystical way of thinking than to have attempted to interject some reality into the story. His way of narrating is reminiscent of a bad acid trip that hits one upfront with an intense and psychedelic experience, complete with demons and fire and dark skies, then slips into an ennui of disconnection with reality that terminates with the passage of time and leaves one with no deeper, inner revelations.
The book was fun for forty some pages, but was about sixty pages too long. The idea that this book has any relevance other than as a specimen of the peculiarity of a certain type of characteristically Jewish fiction is silly. The fact that the book has been represented as truth and propelled its author into fame as an expert on the subject is scary – but somehow also just as characteristically Jewish.
One hopes that one day reality and the Jews will come to some sort of arrangement, just as one knows that such hopes are in vain. While Wiesel certainly did not survive by a hair’s breadth being cast into a pit of fire by the Germans, one wonders if, at the end of his pathetic life, there isn’t another Being with a pit of fire waiting to welcome him in.
http://www.overthrow.com/lsn/news.asp?articleID=6866
A Review Of Elie Wiesel's Bad Acid Trip
3/14/2004 11:07:25 PM
Bill White
Book Review -- I just finished reading Elie Wiesel’s book Night. The only way I can describe it as a mix between silly and goofy. I think if everyone had to read the first thirty or so pages of it – the bit with the crazy Jewish prophetess screaming about flames – that the Holocaust story would have been laughed out of the collective consciousness of Jew influenced mankind long ago. Reading it at first was entertaining – a bit like Kafka, another crazy Jew – then a bit boring, and then, as I reflected and realized that this was meant as a work of non-fiction, and was accepted seriously as such by some people, almost as surreal as the text itself.
The book’s story is ridiculous and poorly constructed. The beginning is intriguing, though, because it is so surreal. If this work were to start “Someone must have been telling lies about Elie W., because he woke up one day to find himself in Auschwitz”, it would have been a fitting beginning. The main literary trouble with the book is that Wiesel pulls back from the surreal after leaving Auschwitz and decides to just lie instead – making for a much less interesting read.
The book starts with Wiesel as a Jewish boy devoted to God in his village. A group of “foreign Jews” are taken from the village by train to another country and machine-gunned. Why the Germans would have taken these Jews to another country by train to machinegun them when they could have been machine- gunned perfectly well at home is not explained. One of these Jews, a Jewish mystic named Moche, survives being machine gunned because he lays in a dirty pit with corpses three days with a leg wound. The obvious – that if you were lie three days in a dirty pit with corpses three days with a bullet-related leg wound you would get gangrene and die – is ignored. Moche then walks, with a leg mutilated badly enough by a bullet that he was mistaken for dead, back to his village to see Elie and warn Elie of coming atrocities.
The fact that Moche is a Jewish mystic and Elie is an advanced Talmudic student is the foundation on which the larger mystical theme of the book is based – as if Wiesel was anticipated Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ style of magical realism. The world in which Elie exists is one in which the basic laws of physics and human behavior can be suspended to express things which the author believes are more real than reality itself. This places Wiesel’s work squarely in the realm of fiction, alongside authors like Kafka (a master of the style) and Marquez (whose ability to place words in close enough proximity that some humans can derive meaning from them while simultaneously being non- white has earned him a number of prizes.)
Moche’s atrocity stories are amusing. In particular, the assertion that he sees babies thrown into the air for machine gun practice I found peculiar, given that I often shoot trap, and have fired automatic weapons, and know that it would be very difficult, not to mention unsafe, to toss a baby in the air in such a way that one could meaningfully target it with a machine gun. In fact, the description invoked, in me, the image of a trap (like a trap- shooting trap) whose arm flung around to toss babies in the air – very funny. It was one of the first bouts of laughter the book really brought out in me.
Elie’s personal journey begins when the Hungarian fascists invite the German military in and the Germans take control of his village. I do not know what historical reality there may be to these events. However, Wiesel, near the end of 1944, is rounded up by the Germans, first into a ghetto, and then deported by cattle car to Poland.
The account of Wiesel’s deportation is peculiar. First, he speaks in praise of the ghetto, because it was administered by Jews, and a general Zionist undercurrent flows beneath his overall mystical-religious theme. His use of foreshadowing in the book, not only of events to occur later in the text, but of historical events to occur after the text’s conclusion – the founding of the Zionist Entity and the beginning of the occupation of Palestine, in particular – is one of the few skillfully implemented literary devices in the work. One wonders if his editors suggested it.
The Hungarian police and the “fascists” round up the ghetto street by street, and the Jews willingly give up their possessions and their houses with almost no resistance. This image of the weak and passive Jew strikes one as more of a literary device designed to bring out the author’s message than as a historical accounting of fact. Wiesel plays to Jewish stereotypes to emphasize his Zionist message, which is that the passivity of Jews has been key in breaking their relationship with and causing their abandonment by God. Again, a sense of “magical realism” pervades.
In the cattle cars, the Jews continue to remain passive, even as their gold and their money are stripped from them, and they are left without adequate food, clothing or other necessities. On the journey, a Jewish woman, a mystic of some sort, begins to have visions, and begins to scream about “flames” and the coming destruction of the Jews by fire. The other Jews ignore her and eventually beat her to make her shut up. What is peculiar about this episode is that there does not appear to have been any attempt on the part of the author to make the reader believe it was a literally real event – the use of it in the development of the literary theme is obvious and almost disingenuous – yet the book itself is categorized as autobiographical, as if the events described were meant to reflect literal reality. It is during the rantings of the Jewish mystic that even a slow reader is forced to notice that they are reading a work of fiction; the fact that there are those who do not recognize the book as such, or that there was a time when the book was not widely recognized as such, gives the current reality itself a surreal air.
The arrival at Auschwitz is the last event in the “magically real” portion of the narrative, after which the book devolves into the more mundanely untrue. The Jews, arriving at Auschwitz in their imaginary cattle car, cluster to the window to see an equally imaginary chimney belching imaginary smoke and flame. This is the fire that the Jewish mystic warned about, and if the narrative were to end with it consuming Elie and his fellow Jews, this novelette would end a well crafted and entertaining short story.
But it is not to be so. Elie’s family is separated and he and his father are sent in one direction, while the women are sent the other. While with his father, the other Jews warn them and the other prisoners that they are to be cast into the flaming pit. One wonder if the “flaming pit” is not a literary metaphor for Hell or the Jewish Gehenna. One is given a mental image of darkened skies and a ground alive in flame – a bit like a level from the computer game “Doom”. Elie and his father march off with the prisoners to a position closer to the pit, where Elie sees a truck drive up which is full of babies -- needless to say that is a peculiar thing for a truck to be full of, one wonders how they were packaged. Elie then says the truck (apparently unaided by human hands), dumps the children into the flaming pit before his eyes. One presumes, then, that this was a dump truck, which begs the question of how the children were loaded into it in the first place, unless they were dropped from a platform. One also wonders if this is not meant as a literary metaphor for the destruction of Jewish youth by the effects of the horror of the war; if so, it would have more credibility than as a literal description of some imagined atrocity.
Elie, his father and the rest of the Jewish cabal are marched towards the pit, with the belief that they are to be marched all the way in. Again, this scene only makes literary sense if the pit is a metaphor; to believe that there was some literal flaming pit that they were to be marched into is nonsense, as is the belief that a group of Jews would walk towards it with merely verbal orders. For anyone who has been near a large fire, Wiesel’s assertion that they walked within two steps of the flame of their own free will is nonsense – it would simply have been too hot for anyone to do such a thing of their own non-physically coerced volition (and the mere implication of a threat when no violence had yet occurred is not sufficient physical coercion).
Wiesel and the cabal are then suddenly stopped before the pit and marched into a barracks, where they are deloused and shipped off to Auschwitz I and then to Buna. It in this part, around page 45 or so, that the book drops its magical realism and becomes a mere false account. It would have been more entertaining – and superior from a literary perspective – if Wiesel had continued the magical reasoning with ever deepening descriptions of violence and torture; instead, his suffering becomes more mundane.
At this point I should insert that his description of prison life overall, and the nature of the lies he tells, suggested to me that Wiesel has never actually been incarcerated. His approach really makes me wonder if he didn’t stitch the alleged concentration camp number he has onto his arm himself, and if anyone can tell me there is any proof that Wiesel ever spent any real time in any concentration camp or other type of incarceration, it would be greatly appreciated.
Because Wiesel’s description of the camps is bland and rather repetitive, I will leave a chronological account of his narrative to describe the overall impression of this portion.
First, Wiesel’s foci are typical of the prisoner – there are complaints about exhaustion, having to work (Wiesel, being a student, had never had to work), and the food being offered. If it can be demonstrated Wiesel has actually been in a camp, and didn’t merely have himself tattooed so he could write books, the time he describes is one when there were general shortages of rations, and his complaints about being underfed and overworked probably would be the perspective typical of a prisoner of the time.
What is most noteworthy about this portion of the account, though, is the number of times that his father dies, which blurs with an overall theme of fear of “selection.”
Wiesel’s father dies at least four or five times because he finally kicks the bucket, and one wonders what the actual truth behind the matter is. I would want to strongly examine the claim that Wiesel’s father was actually in a camp with him (if Wiesel himself were truly in a camp at all) before I could even believe the story that far. Wiesel’s father is really the only remaining literary vestige of the book after Wiesel abandons the magically real opening sequence. The father symbolizes something – what is unclear.
Wiesel describes the constant fear of “selection”, “selection” being selection to be killed. He never mentions gas chambers in conjunction with this – he always states that the fear is either of being cast into the flames – psyche Haidi proaipsen, as Homer might say – or of being shot. Though several characters are hanged in the book, Wiesel seems to have no fear of that. One wonders if the “flames” here are not a continuing metaphor for a more metaphysical danger to his father’s soul (presuming, of course, that, being Jew, Wiesel misperceives the dark void of his Jewish inner being as being soul-like). Given the religious overtones of the book and Wiesel’s constant questioning of God – earlier on Moche has suggested that the questioning of God is the most true form of divine communion – I would tend to see the crematoria as a metaphor and not as intended to be a literal truth, a tendency which preserves the narrative while causing me further deep doubts about the nature of those portions of International Judaism that demand that the facts be brought into accordance with their literature.
Wiesel’s father is “selected” to die multiple times. He is selected to die for being weak in the barracks. After the Germans abandon the camp (leaving chronological order here), he is selected to die by shooting, then by being tossed from a train, then by starvation. In fact, in each case, Wiesel makes such a big deal of his father’s imminent demise that, when his father popped up again still alive, I had to go back and re-read to correct my misunderstanding that the old man had finally popped off. Each rescue is a deus ex machina, indicating an overuse of the technique, if one does not interpret it in the “magically real” world of his father, on the brink of temptation that would damn his soul, coming back to reality.
Near the end of the Banu portion of the narrative, Wiesel injures his foot and is laid up in the hospital ward. Despite constant threats to shoot the weak and the injured, the Germans perform surgery on him for the purpose of nursing him back to health. While his foot, which was cut open to reduce pus, infection, and remove fluids causing swelling, is healing, the Germans decide to abandon the camp and flee with its internees. Wiesel gets up on the injured leg and – not walks, but runs – forty two mile in less than twenty four hours. As in several other places – such as his alleged repeated personal contacts with Dr Mengele – Wiesel’s liberties with truth have no apparent literary meaning and devolve into the simple lie.
Regarding the leg injury, I am reminded of the movie Mountains of the Moon, where Sir Richard Burton, exploring Africa, similarly injured both his feet, and is the recipient of a rude surgery cutting them open to remove the fluids. Burton is carried by natives on a stretcher for several weeks. Unless the Jewish anatomy is much more significantly prejudiced towards regeneration than that of white men – and I see no evidence of that – Mr Wiesel did not run forty two miles on a foot that had been sliced open and drained of fluids only days ago.
And before going to the climactic “journey” portion of the narrative, it is important to note one other major lie – minor ones, like his encounter with the French girl and so forth are so eclipsed by his whoppers to be rendered moot. Mr Wiesel states that he was whipped twenty five times with a bullwhip for the infraction of seeing a “kapo” watching over him have sex. If this is true, Mr Wiesel’s back should still bear the scars of being scourged with a bull whip. I am not totally familiar with the literature regarding him, but I have never heard of him displaying such scars – and one would not think him the type that was inclined to keep such thing private.
When the Russians approach the camp the SS allegedly rounds the prisoners up and forces them to run forty two miles to another camp. Mr Wiesel’s father dies twice – actually three times, including a near death during a stopover after the first day – during this journey. Like the cat the old man appears to have nine lives, and again I wonder if the father existed at all – perhaps he is just a metaphor for Elie’s inner spirit, his faith, or his stamina.
Why the SS would choose to run so far is unclear; one presumes there was no particular reason they couldn’t have taken trucks or motored vehicles. Why the prisoners would chose to go with the Germans instead of await the Russians – and they clearly have the choice – is unclear from Wiesel’s narrative. The literary necessity is that the father isn’t dead yet, and still needs to die; the fact that reality is not driven by literary necessity is ignored.
Upon arrival in the next camp, Gleiwicz, the father dies again, but is restored. There is some scrounging for food. Elie encounters a boy he knows who, despite being stripped naked, forced to work, and forced to run forty two miles through the snow in less than twenty four hours while injured, has survived with his violin. They are crowded into a room so cramped that Elie feels he will literary suffocate because someone is thrown – by who is unclear – on top of him. However, that night, this boy finds the strength and the physical space necessary to play Beethoven on his violin, then dies. I laughed hard, because my mental image was of the HP Lovecraft story – the Music of someone, I forget who – where a man plays his violin frantically to keep the Cthulu horrors at bay, then dies. Wiesel’s account has about as much credibility.
After this, they all board cattle cars again, and the father is about to be thrown from the train as dead, but is restored. There is fighting on the cattle car between fathers and sons over loafs of bread and one wonders if what is being described is not an inner battle between Jews and their faith that is being expressed metaphorically through seemingly “real” events. Wiesel’s attempt, however, to tie this in with a later life experience of a French woman throwing coins to Arabs in Aden suggests, though, that Wiesel wants this story to be seen as literally real – another peculiar manifestation of the Jewish inability to distinguish between their imaginations, thoughts and fantasies, and actual reality.
Elie then ends up in Buchenwald, and the narrative abruptly stops. The father dies. Elie has nothing more to say. One wonders if Wiesel has merely run out of lies to tell, or if what he is describing is the inner spiritual death of his character – manifested in a metaphorical father – after which there is no more reveleation to be had. This story climaxes, but the climax is more of the style of James Joyce’s inner realization style of writing than a proper literary end. The liberation of the camp is a denouement, as untrue as anything else Wiesel writes. In the description of the liberation, Wiesel, in fact, appears to have abandoned any pretense of literary merit and merely written a blaise lie to bring to an end a story that was poorly planned from the beginning.
Wiesel would have been much better off to have cast this book as a work of experimental fiction and continued to develop his magically-real Jewish mystical way of thinking than to have attempted to interject some reality into the story. His way of narrating is reminiscent of a bad acid trip that hits one upfront with an intense and psychedelic experience, complete with demons and fire and dark skies, then slips into an ennui of disconnection with reality that terminates with the passage of time and leaves one with no deeper, inner revelations.
The book was fun for forty some pages, but was about sixty pages too long. The idea that this book has any relevance other than as a specimen of the peculiarity of a certain type of characteristically Jewish fiction is silly. The fact that the book has been represented as truth and propelled its author into fame as an expert on the subject is scary – but somehow also just as characteristically Jewish.
One hopes that one day reality and the Jews will come to some sort of arrangement, just as one knows that such hopes are in vain. While Wiesel certainly did not survive by a hair’s breadth being cast into a pit of fire by the Germans, one wonders if, at the end of his pathetic life, there isn’t another Being with a pit of fire waiting to welcome him in.
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