Rating: 5/5
The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.
In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.
At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: ‘Warning! Danger of death.’ What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death?
Elie Wiesel was in his early teens when a ghetto for the Jews was formed around his hometown Sighet in 1944. Life seemed to continue as normal for a short time. Elie, a Jew devoted wholeheartedly to his religion, spent his days and nights studying Kabbalah (an esoteric way of interpreting the Old Testament).
One day, Elie’s father, a socially high gentleman in the community called Shlomo, was called away to the council held in Sighet. When he returned in the late evening, he held bad news: the SS would be arriving the next day, and they were to be deported.
In the early morning, the Wiesels and all the other inhabitants of Sighet lined up in the street in front of the SS, ready to be deported. Where they were going, they had no idea. Women and girls were ordered to line up on one side, men and boys in the other. Elie and his father were separated from their female relatives. Elie described how terrible it was to see his mother, seven-year-old sister Tzipora, and older sisters Hilda and Beatrice taken away from him. He would never see his mother or Tzipora again.
He and Shlomo were one of the last Jews to be deported. When they finally boarded the train, they were shoved into tightly crowded cattle carriages. The train stopped at last days later. The nearest sign read ‘Auschwitz.’ The name meant nothing to them.
On first arrival at the notorious concentration camp, a ‘selection’ was made: those that were deemed healthy enough for labour were sent to the line on the right, while the left line led straight to the crematorium.
Elie and Shlomo were sent straight to the queue on the left. Elie described his horror at seeing where the line went to: a large, deep pit of fire, where boys and men alike were forced to walk in and burn to death. If they did not do so themselves, the SS officers picked them up and hurled them in mercilessly. Miraculously, Elie and his father were saved from this seemingly inevitable fate—just as Elie was preparing to jump onto the electrified fence nearby to serve a quicker demise, the march into the flames was called off, and the line was directed to the rear end of the camp.
Elie describes in his autobiography how his faith in God was “murdered” when he saw that pit of fire and the children being thrown into it (
‘Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes’). Throughout the book, Elie talks about how his faith and religion was completely overturned as though at the flick of a switch. Though, he said, he would never fully deny the existence of God, he no longer believed that he was a just and fair idol and refused to worship him as he had previously done.
During his time at Auschwitz, Elie witnessed many more war crimes. Hangings were frequent; once, he was forced to watch the lynching of three small boys. At this time in the novel, Elie writes:
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“For God’s sake, where is God?”
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
“Where is he? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.”
Elie and Shlomo survived Auschwitz by the skin of their teeth. Emaciated and ghost-like, they were herded from the concentration camp to a subcamp of Auschwitz, Buna the labour camp. There, the Wiesels escaped yet more near-death encounters and bore witness to the most terrible war crimes of the century.
Their work finished in Buna months later, Elie and Shlomo were deported yet again: this time to the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. His father did not survive the terrors the two experienced there; he died less than three months before the camp was liberated.
It is a miracle that Elie lived to see the liberation of the camp. This book is a truly touching novel, written expertly. I look forward to reading the sequel,
Dawn.