Elie’s Wiesel and NightDo you see that chimney over there’see it? Do you see those flames? Over there-that’s where you’re going to be taken. That’s your grave, over there. Haven’tyou realize it yet? You dumb bastards, don’t you understand anything? You’regoing to be burned.
Frizzed away. Turned into ashes. Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. It is theautobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. ElieWiesel writes of their battle for survival, and with his battle with God for away to understand the wanton cruelty he witnessed each day. Elie Wiesel was born in a little, quiet town called Sighet, in transylvaniawhere he had lived all of his young life.
Quiet until the 1940’s, when the city,and eke himself charged for ever, just as Europe, and for that matter the world. One day they expelled all the foreigners of the city, and Wiesels master in thestudy of cabbala (Jewish mysticism) of a foreigner so he was expelled too. The deportees were soon forgotten, he writes. However a few lines later heexplains why this is relevant, and gives the reader an idea of what was going onin the minds of the jews living where he did.
He told his story (referring to the expelled Rabbi) and that of his companions. The train full of deportees had crossed the Hungarian frontier and on Polishterritory had been taken in charge by the Gestapo. The jews had to get out andclimb into lorries. The lorries dove towards a forest. The jews were made to getout. They were made to dig huge graves.
And when they had finished their work,the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion, without taste, they slaughtered theirprisoners. Each one had to go up to the hole and present its neck. Babies werethrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets. .
. Throughlong days and nights, he went from one Jewish house to another, telling thestory Malke, the young girl who had taken three days to die, and of tabias, thetailor, who had begged to be killed
