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171

night

(ElIE WIEsEl)

,.

"Elie Wiesel's Night and Dying

in the Present Tense"

by Kitty Millet, San Francisco State University

Elie Wiesel's Night chronicles the Wiesel family's deportation from

Sighet, Hungary, to the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. By

the time of his liberation from Buchenwald at the age of sixteen, the

narrator Elie will lose his mother, sister, father, his entire community,

and his faith to the Nazis. He will understand himself as already dead,

characterizing his losses at the camps as an unending night in which

he and the other Jewish inmates experience a slow, continuous dying.

For most people, death is a finite experience, an end in itself, with

obvious boundaries. However, Wiesel tells us of those for whom death

is infinite: ey are always dying in the present tense. Death and

dying are fluid and constant experiences for the Jews of Sighet, for the

inmates at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, for those eternally marching,

being forced to drag themselves further and further into that night.

is gets to the heart of Wiesel's narrative, because this dying suggests

a duration impossible to map in hours and minutes.

e Jewish inmates experience a dying that extends far beyond

time and space, making it an unbounded experience. Yet even as this

unbounded death sweeps up the Jews, it proceeds in stages, stripping

them immediately of their civil entitlements, changing them from

subjects to "a pack of beaten animals," from bodies to body parts, from

mechanistic drives to shadows, and from shadows to corpses. ese

stages will underwrite the unboundedness as it shifts death from what

is knowable to a dying experience that exceeds human perception. In

e Holocaust and Literary Imagination, Lawrence Langer argues that

this shift is a consequence of Auschwitz: Temporality itself is altered

by the camps.

But Elie, the Jewish narrator, the student of Kabbalah and

Talmud, marks his temporality with the signifiers of Judaism: Its

terms, rituals, expectations, and calendar punctuate the life of the

observant boy. e year's discreet divisions between Yom Kippur and

Passover bracket his childhood, ritually reminding him that God has

chosen the Jews and that time itself has been enlisted to bear witness

to that fact. us Elie's experiences of the unboundedness of death

and dying in the camps produce a horrifying conclusion: ere is an

experience of death that can't be integrated into the fabric of Jewish

observance. is will remain with Wiesel, staring at him in the mirror,

"never leaving him."

Wiesel alludes to a change in the duration and status of death and

dying—its temporality and its effect on Jewish observance—when

Moishe the Beadle, "the poorest of the poor of Sighet" and a foreign

Jew, returns from an earlier deportation. e native Jews of Sighet

have "quickly" forgotten the deportees, but Moishe's unexpected reap-

pearance pushes Elie to ask him about his disappearance:

One day, as I was about to enter the synagogue, I saw

Moishe the Beadle sitting on a bench near the entrance.

He told me what had happened to him and his companions.

e train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border

and, once in Polish territory, had been taken over by the

Gestapo. e train had stopped. e Jews were ordered to get

off and onto waiting trucks. e trucks headed toward a forest.

ere everybody was ordered to get out. ey were forced to

dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men

from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they

shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench

one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the

air and used as targets for the machine guns. is took place

in the Galician forest, near Kolomay. How had he, Moishe the

Beadle, been able to escape? By a miracle. He was wounded in

the leg and left for dead . . . (6)

Elie Wiesel

Recounting his story, Moishe tells Elie of the border crossing and the

sudden emergence of the Gestapo. Once the trains have crossed this

boundary, the Jews become the property of the Germans and they

are consigned to death—the crossing itself suggests a new jurisdic-

tion with its own law. e Gestapo's murder of the Jews takes place

"without passion or haste."

Elie discovers that Moishe has changed irrevocably because he

has witnessed this massacre. He "no longer mentioned either God

or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen" (7). us Moishe's

experience of "seeing" his own death recasts him as "a living dead,

unfit for life as defined by his community" (Avni 1995). Moishe's

changed perception translates into his changed status within Sighet.

It also draws attention to how "quickly" the deportees are forgotten,

how Moishe has been forced to witness his own death, and how

the Jews were "already consigned to death, a final verdict" (Wiesel

10) even before the Nazis arrived in Sighet. Although Moishe has

returned to Sighet's Jews, he perceives himself as being on the other

side of death. He exists only because of his will to tell, to warn, other

Jews of the Nazis' plans. e events of this emblematic scene will

circumscribe Elie's experience of death and dying throughout the rest

of his narrative.

When the Nazis occupy Sighet, they round up more Jews for

deportations. At the same time, the Nazis relocate the remaining

families into a smaller ghetto within Sighet. After each subsequent

deportation, the remaining Jews quickly forget the deportees and

comfort themselves with the rationalization that "the yellow star . . .

it's not lethal" (11). As Wiesel points out, the "ghetto was ruled by

neither German nor Jews; it was ruled by delusion" (12). Delusion and

forgetfulness work in tandem to create an atmosphere in which the

Jews fail to grasp the import of these deportations.

On the last night in the ghetto, in his capacity as the leader's son,

Elie must awaken sleeping Jews to their own pending deportation.

But just repeating the message of their deportation "chokes him"

(15). e Nazis' plans for the Jews have already begun to kill him;

he tastes his community's death with the repetition of the message.

e effect of Elie's message furthers the dying process in his commu-

nity as "weariness . . . settled in our veins, our limbs, our brains, like

molten lead" (16). eir bodies are beginning to register the burden

of the final verdict, in that the Jews perceive its burden as an outcome

Night

against which they have no energy to fight. at weariness erodes

their individual wills, transforming them into a pack of "beaten dogs"

(17). In resignation, Elie's community of Jews leaves the ghetto for

the last time:

e procession disappeared around the corner. A few steps

more and they were beyond the ghetto walls. . . . ere was a

little of everything: suitcases, briefcases, bags, knives, dishes,

banknotes, papers, faded portraits. All the things one planned to

take along and finally left behind. ey had ceased to matter.

Open rooms everywhere. Gaping doors and windows

looked out into the void. It all belonged to everyone since it

no longer belonged to anyone. It was there for the taking. An

open tomb. (17)

As the Jews leave, Wiesel notes not only that the objects left behind

ceased to matter, but also that the houses themselves are gaping. e

buildings themselves resemble tombs. But where are the corpses?

Presumably, the Jews who lived in these houses are the corpses forced

to march from the ghetto into the void. e Jews have already begun

the dying process. ey are being forced to march into the void

themselves.

When Wiesel describes Elie's first night at Auschwitz, he charac-

terizes it as "one long night seven times sealed" (34). Wiesel sutures

night, and the death camp of Auschwitz, together with the notion of

the Jewish mystic's seal, and the severity of his depiction can only be

understood through the lens of orthodox Judaism and Jewish mystical

thought.

In Kabbalistic tradition, there is the belief that the soul has been

sealed because of sin so that in our conscious states, we cannot reopen

the soul. As the Jewish mystic endeavors to draw closer to God, he must

inevitably unseal the soul, "untie the knots which bind it" (Scholem

131) by concentrating on the Divine Name (HaShem). is unsealing

releases the mystic into a realm of liberation and transcendence, "the

cosmic stream" (Ibid). As Gershom Scholem describes it in e Major

Trends of Jewish Mysticism, "[T]he seals, which keep it locked up in its

normal state and shut off the divine light, are relaxed, and the mystic

finally dispenses with them altogether" (137). However, if the mystic,

upon entering the cosmic stream, is incapable of resealing his soul,

Elie Wiesel

he can become lost in the cosmic stream, damned to and within it.

Wiesel's language shifts the cosmic stream to the darkness of the first

night at Auschwitz.

In the death camp, when Wiesel declares "the first night . . .

turned my life into one long night seven times sealed," he marks that

there will never be a possibility of unbinding his soul. e death camp

has sealed it. Auschwitz's sealing has cut him off permanently from

the divine light, casting him and the other Jews with him into an

unending night.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that

turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose

bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith

forever. . . .

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and

my soul and turned my dreams to ashes (Wiesel 34).

At that moment, the effect on Elie of the night's murder of "my

God and my soul," suggests that the Divine Name itself has been

destroyed, the divine light permanently blotted out. e most vulner-

able of the Jewish victims, their children, are now "the small faces . . .

transformed into smoke." In a role never imagined by the observant,

Jewish children will now take the place of those offspring formerly

cursed by God. It is as if the sacred narratives underwriting the

Jewish experience have been permanently destroyed. e signifiers on

which he has relied have been conscripted to serve as the terms of his

extermination:

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. (36)

e specter of the void reemerges here. Instead of Sighet's build-

ings and houses—those signifiers of home and community—looking

out onto the void, Elie realizes that the Jews wander in it already—this

Night

exile taking up all others. e void merges then with the darkness; it is

the repository for the demonic and the damned who opposed God, for

failed creation. Wandering, the signifier of diasporic Jewry, becomes

instead an aimless compulsion, "without any hope."

e outlines of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah come

together in Elie's realization that what has happened to the Jews

produces an experience of death and dying that cannot be sanctified

(33). As Elie and his father march together toward the crematoria,

the Jews around them begin reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of

the dead. As they recite, "Yisgadal, veyisgadash, shmey raba . . . May

His name be celebrated and sanctified . . ." (33), Elie questions why

he should sanctify the name. Since they are saying Kaddish for their

own deaths, Elie's question proposes a death outside the boundaries

of sanctification: is death cannot be sanctified. It cannot be brought

within the parameters of sanctifying HaShem.

Elie understands, then, the hopelessness of the Jews around him.

By the next morning "we had ceased to be men. . . . I too had become

a different person. e student of Talmud, the child I was, had been

consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled

me. My soul had been invaded—and devoured—by a black flame"

(37). Elie perceives himself as "a shape that resembles" rather than Elie

who studies Talmud. His pronouns shift from personal to impersonal,

underscoring that his body, like the night itself, has lost specific traits.

It has become indistinguishable from the other bodies around him.

is lack of distinctive traits sets up the Jewish body to be reduced

to its componentry and its functionality in the camps. e inmates

no longer distinguish the boundaries between the stones they touch

and their hands (78). Eventually, Elie feels himself reduced to only a

stomach:

At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily

bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. e bread, the soup—

those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps

less: a famished stomach. e stomach alone was measuring

time. (52)

As the boy internalizes this interminable dying, his body colludes with

the death around him. e only part of his body that still registers the

impulse to live is his stomach.

Elie Wiesel

In this way, Wiesel freights the experience with the image of the

stomach "measuring time." e consequences of this act are not lost

on Wiesel the inmate. e existential reality of the unending night—

its duration—collapses into the Jews' wandering of the void—an

unsanctifiable journey—transforming Elie's hunger into the void

itself. When Yom Kippur occurs in the camp, Elie realizes that this

journey, this duration, was never intended for humans.

YOM KIPPUR. e Day of Atonement. Should we fast?

e question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more

certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting.

It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said

we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We

needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were

capable of singing his praises.

I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had

forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any

reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God's silence. As I

swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of

rebellion, of protest against Him.

And I nibbled my crust of bread.

Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening. (69)

Elie's choice to eat is a form of rebellion against the God who was

silent. In the absence of Judaism's sacred narratives, Elie must look to

his father for another narrative the absence of Judaism's sacred narra-

tives that have historically underpinned Jewish existence opens Elie

up to a "great void" within him. Although Elie conflates his stomach's

measuring time with the "great void," reducing himself to a mecha-

nistic drive, it's still a drive to continue dying rather than the resigna-

tion of sliding into death.

In contrast, Zalman, "a young boy from Poland" who runs beside

Elie on a long march, has stomach cramps, can go no farther, and

drops to the ground with his pants down. Recalling this last image,

Elie concludes that Zalman "must have died, trampled under the feet

of the thousands of men who followed us" (86). e inmates don't

distinguish the inert parts of Zalman's body from their own limbs

sinking into the snow and mud. ey just continue to run. ey are

driven to run.

Night

us, even though Elie marks the obscenity of his last image of

Zalman, lying with his pants down in the dirty snow, Elie cannot stop

running. His body works like a machine, making Elie aware only of

his own discrete body parts.

I soon forgot him. I began to think of myself again. My foot

was aching, I shivered with every step. Just a few more meters

and it will be over. I'll fall. A small red flame . . . A shot . . .

Death enveloped me. It suffocated me. It stuck to me like

glue. I felt I could touch it. e idea of dying, of ceasing to be,

began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the

excruciating pain of my foot. To no longer feel anything, neither

fatigue nor cold, nothing. To break rank, to let myself slide to

the side of the road . . . (85–86)

Elie's overwhelming desire to let himself "slide to the side of the

road," to let himself recede into the earth itself, to finally be free of the

marching and running, like Zalman before him, offers him a moment

when he can imagine a final end to the machine divvying up his body

into its componentry. His discrete parts will cease to exist. For that one

moment, Elie thinks of himself as more than a body, an "I" who could

find relief from dying by quickly ceding himself to death. Elie maps

this tension between the fantasy of an "I" who could forfeit the body

and be dead versus an object that is collected, pressed into service as

the instrument of another's will.

is tension between a "who" and a "what" crystallizes for Elie

in his identification with the dead. Elie recognizes that part of his

experience of dying or existing as "a living dead" requires him to see

himself in the corpses around him. He identifies with them rather

than with the other inmates running next to him. Perhaps one of the

most devastating scenes in Night, this recognition scene concentrates

Elie's attention on his father, the key figure in his identification from

the ghetto to the camps. Initially, Elie identified with his father and

bore a message that "choked" him; now Elie identifies with his father

and he begins to see himself among the bodies of the dead, among the

inanimate corpses.

Beneath our feet there lay men, crushed, trampled underfoot,

dying. Nobody paid attention to them. . . . I saw myself in every

Elie Wiesel

stiffened corpse. Soon I wouldn't even be seeing them anymore;

I would be one of them. A matter of hours. (89)

roughout Western literature, recognition scenes serve to estab-

lish a protagonist's claim to sovereignty, a narrator's membership

in community, or a character's entitlements. However, Elie is no

king; he is a member of a community of corpses. His entitlements

emerge in death, written on the dead bodies scattered around him.

Elie's displacement of recognition from the inmates to the corpses

suggests a dramatic realignment of community: He constructs it

where he finds claim, from among those who are like him, from

among the dead.

is percepton is startlingly different than that of a non-Jewish

survivor of Buchenwald, Jorge Semprun. Like Wiesel, Semprun states

that he died at Buchenwald; however, he recognizes himself as a ghost

or "a living dead" in the eyes of the other inmates and his liberators.

For Wiesel to see himself then in the bodies of the corpses themselves

implies the crossing of a fundamental boundary on the continuum of

dying. Yet Wiesel refuses to cross the last border in this journey.

Although Wiesel can still recognize himself "in every stiffened

corpse," his father no longer possesses this capacity. As Elie pleads

with his father to "go back to the shed," to seek shelter and not to sink

into the snow as the corpses surrounding them have done, Elie real-

izes that his father doesn't answer. He's not even "looking at the dead"

(89). His father has become "one of them." is scene echoes several

aspects of Elie's earlier experiences. He fights to keep his father from

becoming silent, a murder similar to the one that claimed his God

on his first night at Auschwitz, a night that began in an unsanctified

darkness and has yet to end.

Elie and his father return to the shed; Elie's father sags into the

earth. He tells his son to sleep—he will watch over him. But Elie

"rebelled against that death," noting that "Death . . . would seize upon

a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit" (Ibid.).

Bit by bit, piece by piece, Elie has felt discrete parts of his body being

claimed by the process of extermination. Yet he rebels against being

dead in favor of continuing in the unbounded experience of dying.

A sense of obligation to his father fuels his rebellion. Essentially,

he rejects death, but he accepts the twilight existence of dying.

He construes this acceptance as a mitzvah, a performed duty or

Night

obligation that he bears to his father and not to his God. e force of

his mitzvah has been to remain connected to his father, to remember

him, to displace the fulfillment or execution of the Nazis' final

verdict, through his ability to remember his father. e mitzvah has

been his only tether to his survival in dying.

Consequently, when his father finally shows signs of succumbing

to death, Elie describes his final moments with him in two ways: first,

he realizes that his father who runs past him "like a shadow" (107)

neither sees nor recognizes him. In his father's lack of recognition,

Elie knows that the son has ceased to be a member of the father's

community because the father has chosen death (108). He is already

"one of them." Second, Elie still feels the burden of being obligated to

his father, the internalized mitzvah of a son honoring his father. e

tension between fulfilling the mitzvah versus continuing in the void,

to survive in dying, becomes magnified by Elie's realization that his

father is close to the end.

If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my

strength to fight for my own survival, to take care only of myself

. . . Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever. (106)

Elie recognizes that the obligation chafes against his own survival. Just

as his father insisted that Elie eat on Yom Kippur, Elie begins to see

the caretaking of his father as akin to fasting on Yom Kippur; both acts

take away from his ability to keep "running."

But Elie's performance of the mitzvah is not enough to save his

father. As Elie wakes up the next morning, his father's cot now belongs

to another person. Elie didn't hear them take his father to the crema-

toria. He doesn't know if his father had died before they burned his

body. At this point, Wiesel weaves Jewish tradition poignantly into

the reality of the death camp. e night before he had climbed into

the top bunk, struggling with his obligations as a Jewish son. Now he

considers his father's death from the perspective of a Jewish son.

I woke up at dawn on January 29. On my father's cot, there

lay another sick person. ey must have taken him away before

daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was

still breathing. . .

Elie Wiesel

No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his

memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out

to me and I had not answered. (112)

Elie had remained in the state of dying out of an obligation to his

father; he had internalized a mitzvah that required him to remember

his father. Likewise, his father remembers Elie's name at his death. At

that moment, he remembers his son in a gesture recalling the God of

the Hebrew Bible, HaShem, calling to Adam, to any number of his

prophets, to his people, except Elie isn't there. He is not there to say,

"Here am I." e severity of his absence burdens Elie with the under-

standing that his mitzvah for his father has been irrevocably changed.

He must remember that he wasn't there when his father died. is

partial memory suggests itself as the only way that Elie the son can

sanctify his father's death. Elie must mark his memory with the reality

that at the last minute he was not there. His survival in dying requires

him to remember that he was not there.

After his liberation from Buchenwald, as he contemplates

himself in a mirror, Elie realizes that "[F]rom the depths of the

mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. e look in his eyes as he

gazed at me has never left me" (115). As Night ends, Wiesel ponders

the entity in the mirror against who he is after liberation. He will

never be free of the corpse staring at him. He is aware now of an

"I" who can see himself. No longer a stomach, Elie has internalized

the corpses around him. He was one of them. Death and dying

become fluid and constant experiences for the inmates at Auschwitz

and Buchenwald, for those eternally marching, being forced to drag

themselves into that night. is dying suggests a duration impos-

sible to map in hours and minutes because it exceeds common

modes of measurement; however, it does have stages. e inmates

move from subjects to objects, from bodies to body parts, from

shadows to corpses. For the Jewish inmates, dying extends beyond

time and space. is extension makes dying an unbounded experi-

ence because it shifts death from what is knowable to an experience

that exceeds any category of perception. Beyond time and space, it

produces dying as an unending present tense. is space had always

been a place for Jewish faith, but after Auschwitz, this place remains

an unsanctified void.

Night

182

Even more troubling, Wiesel leaves us with the image of the

corpse "contemplating him." e corpse never leaves him. Indelibly

marked by the camps, Elie Wiesel will drag this corpse with him

wherever he goes.

Lawrence Langer argues that temporality itself has been altered

because of the camps. Temporality—the category underwriting all

human experience—has been altered and, with it, space, obligation,

remembrance, faith, and history. e effects of death and dying in the

camps are not measured in terms of hours and minutes but rather

in terms of a never-ending duration that takes up all the funda-

mental narratives underwriting Jewish existence and human history,

violating them and those who would bear their marks. us it remains

unsanctifiable.

W orks cItEd

Avni, Ora. "Beyond psychoanalysis : Elie Wiesel's Night in historical

perspective." In Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish

Question" in France. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge,

1995.

Langer, Lawrence. e Holocaust and Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1975.

Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Ed. Robert Alter.

New York: Schocken, 1954.

Semprun, Jorge. Literature or Life. New York: Viking Press, 1997.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Tr. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Elie Wiesel

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

Beyond psychoanalysis : Elie Wiesel's Night in historical perspective

  • Ora Avni

Avni, Ora. "Beyond psychoanalysis : Elie Wiesel's Night in historical perspective." in Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. new york: Routledge, 1995.

The Holocaust and Literary Imagination

  • Lawrence Langer

Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and Literary Imagination. new Haven: yale University Press, 1975.

Night. tr. Marion Wiesel. new york: Hill and Wang

  • Elie Wiesel

Wiesel, Elie. Night. tr. Marion Wiesel. new york: Hill and Wang, 2006. Elie Wiesel