'The kingdom of Night'

 

Recently, I came across the novella "Night" by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel who was a prolific writer. I decided to read it because of one sentence he wrote in the preface: "If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one."

I shall not read his other writings, not because I run away from morbid stories that give me gloomy or unwholesome feelings, but because of the economy of time. So, the slim volume memoir was a quick read, however, once putting on my thinking cap my head remained covered for a very long time.

Inadequately, it is referenced as the "Holocaust," and the genocide is jointly corroborated by many other stories of eyewitness testimony and giving of graphic evidence by plainly showing and impressing on the mind forever the photographs one has seen. All this is good, lest we forget and that past becomes once again someone's future. We do not wish for a world in which to be inhuman becomes human.

In the spring of 1944, as the enemy army made inroads and arrived in Elie's hometown, he was in his third adolescent teen year. He began to endure, along with other victims, abominable indignities and prolonged sufferings. He was no longer identified by his name, but as A-7713, tattooed on his left forearm.

Elie's knowledge of death and evil was not now limited to natural causes and the occasional evil-minded or evil-doing person that one happens upon, or what might be discovered in literature. He experienced and directly observed the pungent, noxious, revulsive odor, indelibly searing his nostrils, originating from furnaces fueled by the bodies of his mother, baby sister, father and others.

All were reduced to the same fate. "There no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others." The masses became homogenous and all social significance was gone. The presence of God was not palpable despite all prayers.

There was no need for the author to heighten his story with extraneous factors. The monotony and ugliness of what went on there, for him, it was enough to tell the story in full. Yet, he implies that only those who experienced it will know what it really was. Although the painful remembrances were frequent, here we must be reminded that he did not set pen to paper until the tender age of 25. Thus, as a novice, perhaps, a bit of fiction entered his non-fiction work just as fiction has a grain of truth within it.

Nevertheless, Elie's firsthand authentication of the facts is poignant. We are given an affecting, moving sense of loss. We can now express a personal conviction that we will do all we can do to prevent such tragic atrocities from ever occurring again. How do we do that? We must not remain neutral. We must take sides. We must not remain silent, but shout. We must influence and persuade our representatives and leaders to understand that while the victims' "freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs."

Every day, we awake to no less than four pernicious, ongoing armed conflicts in the world. Although rare, it has been necessary and morally right to kill in order to prevent greater killing (consider WWII or the Korean War). Since armed cancerous forces are at work in our society, activism is necessary. Our memory must be jogged.

The author (wrjones@vsu.edu) published the novella "Beyond Harvard" and presently teaches English as a second language.