Against Forgetting

Every once in a while I discover odd gaps in the books I have read, and Night was one of those. Since I learned to read German before I learned to read English, and spent K-7 in the German school system, I usually tend to assume I have read certain childhood classics or novels commonly read in middle school, but under a German name where the translated title doesn’t quite match up.  This was especially the case with the book, Night, which blurs the line between memoir and autobiographical fiction. Germany (at least when I was growing up there 25 years ago) has made an effort to remember its dark past, and once I realized what the Holocaust was at the age of 8, I had no problems finding novels and histories in the children and young adult sections of the bookstore, with novels translated from English (Devil’s Arithmetic became Chaia Heisst Leben), Czech and a variety of other languages.  In fact, I’m sure I had access to books that weren’t available to English speakers. As a result, I was rather surprised when I realized that I hadn’t actually read Night, and decided it was time to remedy that after my recent visit to Auschwitz.

This is a difficult book for me to write about properly given its subject matter and importance.  The preface and foreword provide interesting discussions of the publishing process but after reading I also found some interesting articles discussing how some parts of the book were more fictionalized and what category this book fits into, talking about the idea emotional honesty vs. literal truth. The book started out in Yiddish at over 800 pages and was cut down to a little over 100 pages, changing it an angry testimonial to a piece of art. One of the changes described in a New York Times article actually had struck me even when reading the book itself since I thought the action or wording was odd, but the afterword explained what it had originally said. (The wording in the book was that after liberation, some of the young men went into town to find food and “sleep with girls.” I wondered if there was a women’s camp at Buchenwald or which girls the book referred to – turns out the original wording was “to rape German girls” which makes more sense than recently liberated Jewish men wanting to seduce German village girls or thinking they would succeed given what the German people had done).

Night, told from the perspective of young and intensely devout Eliezer, begins before the Germans came to his small village.  While the Jewish community had some warnings of German actions and intentions, none of them wanted to believe it. They are isolated enough that even rumors of places like Auschwitz have not reached them so it is an extreme shock when Eliezer and his family arrive at Auschwitz after their transport from the ghetto.

The train occupants are quickly divided by gender, with those selected for work to one side and those for immediate death to another. After an initial period assigned to the barracks of Auschwitz I, Eliezer and his father report to a labor camp, and survive long enough to be part of one of the forced death marchs, ending up in Buchenwald.  While I had known that this book was the story of Eliezer’s survival of Auschwitz, I had not realized prior to reading that he and his father were both selected for labor, and this account is very much the story of father-son relationship under extreme conditions, and the boundaries of humanity and survival.

Given how many Holocaust survival stories I have read, nothing in this book was particularly shocking or surprising to me. However, it used its short pages to make a great impact and share anecdotes that went beyond Eliezer and his father, showing how the Germans broke their victims down, taking away their humanity, past love and hope, to creatures focused only on food and survival.  The Germans didn’t only kill, they crushed souls and reduced humans to less than themselves. I can absolutely understand why this would and should be among required reading for middle school.  It shows one person’s journey through hell with language that is clear and understandable.  If some of the scenes don’t make sense with the actual set up of Auschwitz and reality, it still provides emotional truth and serves as a good introduction to what the Holocaust was and what horrors and atrocities were committed.  Given the recent NY Times article about the lack of knowledge about WWII and the Holocaust, that may be more important now than ever.

(Side discussion: I know my perspective is probably skewed since I grew up in Germany, and my parents took me to visit a concentration camp (KZ Dachau) when I was 8, but how old were you when you first found about the Holocaust and what did you learn in school vs. on your own?)