Trident Technical College, Copyright ©2009
This was written as an assignment for my English Comp I class at Trident Technical College. My instructor suggested that I submit it to the new school student anthology.
The atrocities committed upon the Jewish peoples in the early twentieth century are widely known and well documented. Elie Wiesel is one voice among thousands declaring the inhumanity of those times upon his people and himself. At the impressionable age of 16, he suffered the loss of his father to starvation at the Buchenwald concentration camp, as well as the deaths of his mother and younger sister in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Wiesel vowed to not speak for ten years of the torturous brutalities he and ten thousand other prisoners endured (Hurst and Pavlick). His silence ended when he penned Un di Velt Hot Geshvihn (And the World Was Silent), the original Yiddish version of Night in 1954 (McDonald and Trotter 506). Night asserts that what Elie Wiesel witnessed as a young teenager in the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald camps was the numbing effect of constant brutality and the threat of individual annihilation upon social conscience and personal faith. What he also recorded, however, as seen through the refining lens of hindsight, was the glimmer of hope within his people and possible redemption pictured in shadowed Christian symbolism.
In one chapter from Wiesel's account, the prisoners of the death camp are so numbed to the indescribable brutality around them that they are not merely unconcerned bystanders, but have also become willing participants. Wiesel depicts this condition when he tells of a young prisoner from Warsaw who is to be hanged for the crime of stealing. As the verdict is being read and the condemned youth stands defiantly before his executioners, their ability to be affected as a whole is demonstrated in the whispered question of a prisoner named Juliek: “Do you think this ceremony'll be over soon? I'm hungry…” (Wiesel 507). During this grave moment, Juliek's regard is for the prisoners' only meal: soup. Soup is their life. It is their sole concern. Soup is the currency of life. To preserve their own life “Two prisoners helped […] for two plates of soup” (Wiesel 507). The other prisoners do not seem to mind that their fellows assist. It has been said that if you do not resist evil you assist it. This saying speaks of this moment as the prisoners are no longer merely observers but have become actively involved in their own genocide.
Wiesel, on the other hand, though “no longer troubled” by the “thousands who had died […] in the crematory ovens” (Wiesel 507), experiences a re-awakening, if only briefly, of the threat to his life individually. The sheer numbers of the atrocities committed behind the closed doors of the crematory are desensitizing. “But this one […] he overwhelmed me.” (Wiesel 507, emphasis added) Wiesel writes that as he stood watching the Warsaw youth: “I could hear my heart beating” (Wiesel 507, emphasis added). Wiesel's reaction to this single life and his awareness of his own evokes a scenario in which he appears to feel that “This is a person. A vibrant individual. Soon to die. I am an individual. Alive. Death, brutal death, is a very real threat to me.” But the reality did not last. The numbness settled back over him, for when he returns from the execution for the evening meal he “remember[s] that I found the soup excellent that evening…” (Wiesel 508). He is still alive.
Although there are other hangings, it is the shock of executing a young child that produces a spark of humanity within the prisoners; but Wiesel looks upon the scene and loses faith in his God. This hanging is different from the ones before. The crowd spurns participation. There are no prisoners helping this time. As the chairs of the condemned are tipped over, Wiesel states that there is “Total silence throughout the camp” (Wiesel 509). There is no discussion of soup. This dying boy, dying an agonizing death, is more than the group conscience can bear. They openly weep. The “forgotten […] bitter taste of tears” (Wiesel 508) is fresh on their tongues. Unlike the hanging of the defiant Warsaw youth, this hanging touches their hearts. Wiesel, conversely, sees in the horror of this slow, tormenting death of “the sad-eyed angel” (Wiesel 508) the death of his God. As the other other prisoners question where God is during this atrocity, Wiesel responds internally. “Where is He? […] He is hanging here on this gallows…” (Wiesel 509). He sees no other explanation for how this could be happening than that it is God himself being executed. And at the end of the day, even his life giving soup now “tasted of corpses” (Wiesel 509).
God hanging on a gallows. Wiesel himself may not have intended to use Christian symbolism to show the possibility of hope for the prisoners, but a powerful picture of redemption can be seen in the second execution. Author Dorothy Sayers once wrote:
If an image displays the universal pattern, it will display it at all levels and in all circumstances, whether the poet was or could have been conscious of these possible applications or not.(19)
God in the form of Christ hanging upon a cross is the central image of sacrificial redemption for the Christian faith. Wiesel describes this child as “the little servant, the sad-eyed angel” (Wiesel 508). Likewise, Christ is often referred to as the Servant King. In another parallel, this “child with a refined and beautiful face […] would not speak” (Wiesel 508) before his torturers just as Jesus remained silent before his accusers. Additionally, this young innocent “struggl[ed] between life and death” (Wiesel 509) while hanging between two adult prisoners. Three gallows—three crosses. The hearts of the prisoners were rent in two even as the veil of the temple was rent when Christ died (Matthew 27:51). In Christianity, the cross, the sacrifice of Christ, is the symbol of redemption, the payment for and setting free from sin and guilt. Likewise, through the loss of this one, this innocent, many are given an opportunity to free themselves, their hearts and their humanity from the bondage of this insidious holocaust.
Loss. All who faced the threat of these unrelenting atrocities lost. The defiant youth and others—many others—lost their lives. Ten thousand captive bodies lost their sense of humanity, of compassion, of life beyond a bowl of soup. Wiesel lost his faith. Yet the loss of one life, though senseless and tragic, broke through to the hearts of these prisoners— prisoners of body, mind, and soul—offering an opportunity to be human again, redeeming them from the sin of complacency and freeing them to feel again.
Trident Technical College, Copyright ©2009
Works Cited
Hurst, John and James Pavlick. “Elie Wiesel Biography.”
Academy of Achievement ed. Hugh Esten. March 2, 2009.
American Academy of Achievement. March 6, 2009.
www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/wie0bio-1
McDonald, Ann, and Jack Trotter, eds. World Views: Classic
and Contemporary Readings. 5th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2008.
Sayers, Dorothy. Introductory Papers on Dante. New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1954.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Stella Rodway. McDonald and Trotter 506-09.
