NIGHT: “A slim volume of terrifying power”

When the slim volume arrived by courier, I’d been reading other books. I looked at the new arrival, read the blurbs, and smelled it for its deeply sensual pleasure. Then I decided to read a few pages before returning to Barbara Tuchman’s history of the Vietnam War.

I could put down Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT only after reading it completely, every word of it. 

If the lines above gave you the impression it was pleasure reading the 135 pages, you would be grossly mistaken. It was one of the most difficult and disturbing books I’ve ever read. It tells us about the monster that lives within each one of us. It is mind-numbing, and I wouldn’t even try to review it. I am just presenting the basic “storyline”. It will help you understand human nature better.

Eliezer Wiesel’s Jewish family lived happily in the small town of Sighet, Romania. Buffered by Austria and Hungary from Germany, they believed they were safe. Moreover, in the spring of 1944, “there was splendid news from the Russian front. There could no longer be any doubt: Germany would be defeated.” A deeply observant 13-year-old Elie watched elders going about their life, concerned about everything else except “their own fate”.

Their fate was foretold when Budapest radio suddenly announced that the Fascist Party had seized power in Hungary. In less than a week, the German army was in their street. And shortly, the entire Jewish population of the town was moved into and confined in two ghettos. Even then, they believed they would just live there in peace until the Red Army came to free them. “The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.”

Soon all of them would be packed in closed cattle cars so tightly that they wouldn’t even be able to sit down. They would be transported to Auschwitz death camps, where 90% of the deportees would be murdered on arrival, after being shorn of whatever valuables they had on them, including gold teeth. Most would die in gas chambers. Children would be thrown into a fire-pit.

The healthiest 10% would live on to deliver hard labour on near starvation diet … and die slow, miserable deaths.

As Eliezer’s family entered the camp facing SS men and their guns and clubs, someone commanded: “Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Just eight words “spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion” decimated a family. And many other families. That was the last time Elie and his father saw his mother and little sister, who – unknown to them – would be killed soon. He would meet his two older sisters after many years at a camp for war orphans.

The real story begins. The Nazis, with their famous eye for details, would have calculated the bare minimum nutrition needed for a person to survive. The prisoners got not a calorie more. Food consisted of watery soup, and bread, that too on good days. They went without any food many a day.

Hygiene was limited to a jar of disinfectants kept at the entrance of every block, with which the men had to soak themselves before having a luxurious shower followed by sleep on tightly packed hard wooden bunks without sheets. They would begin a day of hard labour early next morning.

They would be driven like than animals, but without the faintest trace of compassion that humans have for cattle, besides incessant abuses, threats, blows, lashes, and execution by public hanging for the slightest perceived lapse. (The extra effort was clearly unnecessary as people were shot at the drop of a hat, but I think the SS needed the spectacle to drive in the wedge of terror deeper into the heart of the prisoner.) Nazis had discovered a simple management principle, if you fell at work, you’d be marked for slaughter.

So the men toiled under the shadow of a chimney bellowing smoke a part of which had been living human beings a few hours ago. The men struggled to the limits of endurance literally under the shadow of death. Period.

If you thought things couldn’t be worse. You would be wrong, again. As the front came closer, Nazis decided to relocate the prisoners to another camp, this time, deep within Germany, in Buchenwald.

To the utter misfortune of the prisoners, the winter had set in. All they had for warm clothing were shirts and trousers removed from their dead comrades. Wiesel writes: “We each had put on several garments, one over the other, to better protect ourselves from the cold. Poor clowns, wider than tall, more dead than alive, poor creatures whose deathly faces peeked out from layers of prisoner’s clothes.”

An icy wind was blowing violently that morning. The prisoners were made to run on snow, pushed by gun wielding guards shouting, “Faster, you filthy dogs!” They ran through the day, they ran through the night. Their guards changed shifts when tired, but the prisoners ran on. Anyone falling behind was shot. But it was more for pleasure, because anyone lying on snow under a pitiless winter night sky didn’t have a ghost of a chance to survive in any case.

It is not clear how long the journey went until they are transferred to another cattle-car, this time, without a roof! And as the train trudges on through pouring snow and stops for eternity, the prisoners have nothing to eat or drink, except when curious German onlookers throw a few loaves of bread to the pitiable creatures on board. And as many men fight for the crumbs, people die. Eliezer – he is just 15 – watches a son snatching away bread from his dying father. They old man desperately clings on to his bread and pleads, “Son, you are killing me for a loaf of bread?”

By the time son achieves his goal, father is dead. The living desperately munches the food that might have saved the dead.

On the way, corpses are thrown out casually by men who themselves could have been cast away, dead. A hundred men boarded a wagon with Elie; only 12 get off at Buchenwald, where they would wait for death or liberation.

Some tragedy can only be described only in words, and not by pictures or films. Printed words can expand our horizon in a unique way and help us see the unseen, without which our world view would be much poorer.

Please read this book if you can. And think how well we have been able to deal with the monster that lives within every one of us.

06 September 2017

[Photo of Buchenwald Camp taken five days after its liberation by the Red Army; Elie Wiesel is on the second row from bottom, seventh from left, next to the plank. Courtesy the Wikipedia]