Rating: 5/5
** spoiler alert **
There was an unexpected light in the cell; the boundaries were drawn, the roles well defined. The time of doubt and questioning and uncertainty was over. I was a hand holding a revolver; I was the revolver that held my hand.
“Don’t judge me, Father,” I implored him, trembling with despair. “You must judge God. He is the first cause, the prime mover; he conceived men and things the way they are. You are dead, Father, and only the dead may judge God.”
I was completely enraptured by this book. I believe that Wiesel’s writing will never be equalled. He carries the reader away on a journey like no other: a journey of no smiles, no laughs, only tears and sorrow and pity. I have read many novels in which the narrator might say, “My heart was breaking,” or “he died of heartbreak.” I have wondered what it is to feel your heart breaking. When I read this book, I found out.
Elie Wiesel narrates a work of fiction written as though it were true. A follow-up of his previous novel, a true story of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during WWII (called
Night), it describes what Elie did once he was released. Unaware that two of his sisters had survived the Holocaust, he journeyed to Paris, homeless and hopeless.
One day, a man knocks on Elie’s hotel door and introduces himself solely as “Gad”. He says he is part of “The Movement” (the Haganah), a paramilitary Jewish resistance group. Elie agrees to join the group. When the British capture a member of The Movement, David ben Moshe, and announce that they will hang him at dawn for being involved in the Haganah, the Haganah in turn capture a British captain called John Dawson. If, they say, the English kill ben Moshe, they will kill John Dawson.
But the English will not give in. At dawn they will hang Moshe, and at dawn, the task of killing Captain Dawson falls upon the shoulders of Elie.
This book is full of inspiring and heart-wrenching passages, so much so that I wish I could put the whole book in quotation marks and say, “Here you go. There’s my quote.” Wiesel’s writing is like no other: there are no words that I can use to describe it. His horror at having to kill John Dawson drives him half-insane. He begins to think of the thousands of people who died during WWII, including his parents, best friend and seven-year-old sister. Among these ghosts is Elie. The ghost of a young boy called Elie Wiesel, who knew nothing but innocence and ignorance.
John Dawson shook his head and said in an infinitely sad voice, “You hate me, don’t you?”
I didn’t hate him at all, but I wanted to hate him. That would have made it all very easy. Hate—like faith or love or war—justifies everything.