Front Matter (Preface and Foreword) Night by Elie Wiesel
by Elie Wiesel
Preface to the New Translation
IF IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one
book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my
writings after Night, including those
that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear its
stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my
works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the
contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense,
terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of
mankind? Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, to help prevent
history from repeating itself? Or was it simply to preserve a record of the
ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one's knowledge of death and
evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature? There are those who
tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I
don't know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself.
A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why
not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance.
However, having survived, I needed to give
some meaning to my survival. Was it to protect that meaning that I set to paper
an experience in which nothing made any sense? In retrospect I must confess
that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words.
I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer—or my life,
period— would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has
a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory
by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory. For today, thanks to
recently discovered documents, the evidence shows that in the early days of
their accession to power, the Nazis in Germany
CONVINCED THAT THIS PERIOD in history would
be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I
had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware
of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became
clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language. But how was one to
rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy?
Hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney: these words all have
intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else. Writing in my
mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every
sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other
images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”?
“It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped,
profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless. Was
there a way to describe the last journey in sealed cattle cars, the last voyage
toward the unknown? Or the discovery of a demented and glacial universe where
to be inhuman was human, where disciplined, educated men in uniform came to
kill, and innocent children and weary old men came to die? Or the countless
separations on a single fiery night, the tearing apart of entire families,
entire communities? Or, incredibly, the vanishing of a beautiful, well-behaved
little Jewish girl with golden hair and a sad smile, murdered with her mother
the very night of their arrival? How was one to speak of them without trembling
and a heart broken for all eternity? Deep down, the witness knew then, as he
does now, that his testimony would not be received. After all, it deals with an
event that sprang from the darkest zone of man. Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know. But would
they at least understand?
Could men and women who consider it normal
to assist the weak, to heal the sick, to protect small children, and to respect
the wisdom of their elders understand what happened there? Would they be able
to comprehend how, within that cursed universe, the masters tortured the weak
and massacred the children, the sick, and the old? And yet, having lived
through this experience, one could not keep silent no matter how difficult, if
not impossible, it was to speak. And so I persevered. And trusted the silence
that envelops and transcends words. Knowing all the while that any one of the
fields of ashes in Birkenau carries more weight than all the testimonies about
Birkenau. For, despite all my attempts to articulate the unspeakable, “it” is
still not right. Is that why my manuscript—written in Yiddish as “And the World
Remained Silent” and translated first into French, then into English—was
rejected by every major publisher, French and American, despite the tireless
efforts of the great Catholic French writer and Nobel laureate François
Mauriac? After months and months of personal visits, letters, and telephone
calls, he finally succeeded in getting it into print. Though I made numerous
cuts, the original Yiddish version still was long. Jérôme Lindon, the legendary
head of the small but prestigious Éditions de Minuit, edited and further cut
the French version. I accepted his decision because I worried that some things
might be superfluous. Substance alone mattered. I was more afraid of having
said too much than too little. Example: in the Yiddish version, the narrative
opens with these cynical musings: In the beginning there was faith—which is
childish; trust—which is vain; and illusion—which is dangerous.
We believed in God, trusted in man, and
lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred
spark from the Shekhinah's flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and
in his soul a reflection of God's image. That was the source if not the cause
of all our ordeals. Other passages from the original Yiddish text had more on
the death of my father and on the Liberation. Why not include those in this new
translation? Too personal, too private, perhaps; they need to remain between
the lines. And yet… I remember that night, the most horrendous of my life:
…Eliezer, my son, come here… I want to tell you something…Only to you… Come,
don't leave m e alone…Eliezer…" I heard his voice, grasped the meaning of
his words and the tragic dimension of the moment, yet I did not move. It had
been his last wish to have me next to him in his agony, at the moment when his
soul was tearing itself from his lacerated body—yet I did not let him have his
wish. I was afraid. Afraid of the blows. That was why I remained deaf to his
cries. Instead of sacrificing my miserable life and rushing to his side, taking
his hand, reassuring him, showing him that he was not abandoned, that I was
near him, that I felt his sorrow, instead of all that, I remained flat on my
back, asking God to make my father stop calling my name, to make him stop
crying. So afraid was I to incur the wrath of the SS. In fact, my father was no
longer conscious. Yet his plaintive, harrowing voice went on piercing the silence
and calling me, nobody but me.
“Well?” The SS had flown into a rage and
was striking my father on the head: “Be quiet, old man! Be quiet!” My father no
longer felt the club's blows; I did. And yet I did not react. I let the SS beat
my father, I left him alone in the clutches of death. Worse: I was angry with
him for having been noisy, for having cried, for provoking the wrath of the SS.
“Eliezer! Eliezer! Come, don't leave me alone…” His voice had reached me from
so far away, from so close. But I had not moved. I shall never forgive myself.
Nor shall I ever forgive the world for having pushed me against the wall, for
having turned me into a stranger, for having awakened in me the basest, most
primitive instincts. His last word had been my name. A summons. And I had not
responded. In the Yiddish version, the narrative does not end with the image in
the mirror, but with a gloomy meditation on the present: And now, scarcely ten
years after Buchenwald , I realize that the
world forgets quickly. Today, Germany Hamburg and Munich Germany , France , and even the United States
THE READER would be entitled to ask: Why
this new translation, since the earlier one has been around for forty-five
years? If it is not faithful or not good enough, why did I wait so long to
replace it with one better and closer to the original? In response, I would say
only that back then, I was an unknown writer who was just getting started. My
English was far from good. When my British publisher told me that he had found
a translator, I was pleased. I later read the translation and it seemed all
right. I never reread it. Since then, many of my other works have been
translated by Marion, my wife, who knows my voice and how to transmit it better
than anyone else. I am fortunate: when Farrar, Straus and Giroux asked her to
prepare a new translation, she accepted. I am convinced that the readers will
appreciate her work. In fact, as a result of her rigorous editing, I was able
to correct and revise a number of important details. And so, as I reread this
text written so long ago, I am glad that I did not wait any longer. And yet, I
still wonder: Have I used the right words? I speak of my first night over
there. The discovery of the reality inside the barbed wire. The warnings of a
“veteran” inmate, counseling my father and myself to lie about our ages: my
father was to make himself younger, and I older. The selection. The march
toward the chimneys looming in the distance under an indifferent sky. The
infants thrown into fiery ditches… I did not say that they were alive, but that
was what I thought. But then I convinced myself: no, they were dead, otherwise
I surely would have lost my mind. And yet fellow inmates also saw them; they were
alive when they were thrown into the flames. Historians, among them Telford
Taylor, confirmed it. And yet somehow I did not lose my mind.
BEFORE CONCLUDING this introduction, I
believe it important to emphasize how strongly I feel that books, just like
people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both. Earlier, I
described the difficulties encountered by Night
before its publication in French, forty-seven years ago. Despite overwhelmingly
favorable reviews, the book sold poorly. The subject was considered morbid and
interested no one. If a rabbi happened to mention the book in his sermon, there
were always people ready to complain that it was senseless to “burden our
children with the tragedies of the Jewish past.” Since then, much has changed. Night has been received in ways that I
never expected. Today, students in high schools and colleges in the United States Auschwitz has become
part of mainstream culture. There are films, plays, novels, international
conferences, exhibitions, annual ceremonies with the participation of the
nation's officialdom. The most striking example is that of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum
in Washington , D.C.
SOMETIMES I AM ASKED if I know “the
response to Auschwitz ”; I answer that not only
do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has
a response. What I do know is that there is “response” in responsibility. When
we speak of this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant,
“responsibility” is the key word. The witness has forced himself to testify.
For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not
want his past to become their future.
—E.W.
Foreword by François Mauriac
FOREIGN
JOURNALISTS frequently come to see me. I am wary of them, torn as I am between
my desire to speak to them freely and the fear of putting weapons into the
hands of interviewers whose attitude toward France Austerlitz
But these lambs torn from their mothers,
that was an outrage far beyond anything we would have thought possible. I
believe that on that day, I first became aware of the mystery of the iniquity
whose exposure marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. The dream
conceived by Western man in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he
had glimpsed in 1789, and which until August 2, 1914, had become stronger with
the advent of the Enlightenment and scientific discoveries—that dream finally
vanished for me before those trainloads of small children. And yet I was still
thousands of miles away from imagining that these children were destined to
feed the gas chambers and crematoria. This, then, was what I probably told this
journalist. And when I said, with a sigh, “I have thought of these children so
many times!” he told me, “I was one of them.” He was one of them! He had seen
his mother, a beloved little sister, and most of his family, except his father
and two other sisters, disappear in a furnace fueled by living creatures. As
for his father, the boy had to witness his martyrdom day after day and,
finally, his agony and death. And what a death! The circumstances of it are
narrated in this book, and I shall allow readers—who should be as numerous as
those reading The Diary of Anne Frank—to
discover them for themselves as well as by what miracle the child himself
escaped. I maintain therefore that this personal record, coming as it does
after so many others and describing an abomination such as we might have
thought no longer had any secrets for us, is different, distinct, and unique
nevertheless. The fate of the Jews of the small town in Transylvania called
Sighet; their blindness as they confronted a destiny from which they would have
still had time to flee; the inconceivable passivity with which they surrendered
to it, deaf to the warnings and pleas of a witness who, having escaped the
massacre, relates to them what he has seen with his own eyes, but they refuse
to believe him and call him a madman—this set of circumstances would surely
have sufficed to inspire a book to which, I believe, no other can be compared.
It is, however, another aspect of this extraordinary book that has held my
attention. The child who tells us his story here was one of God's chosen. From
the time he began to think, he lived only for God, studying the Talmud, eager
to be initiated into the Kabbalah, wholly dedicated to the Almighty. Have we
ever considered the consequence of a less visible, less striking abomination,
yet the worst of all, for those of us who have faith: the death of God in the
soul of a child who suddenly faces absolute evil? Let us try to imagine what
goes on in his mind as his eyes watch rings of black smoke unfurl in the sky,
smoke that emanates from the furnaces into which his little sister and his
mother had been thrown after thousands of other victims: 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 the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of
the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and
my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even
were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. It was then that I
understood what had first appealed to me about this young Jew: the gaze of a
Lazarus risen from the dead yet still held captive in the somber regions into
which he had strayed, stumbling over desecrated corpses. For him, Nietzsche's
cry articulated an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of
gentleness and consolation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had, under the
watchful gaze of this child, vanished forever into the smoke of the human
holocaust demanded by the Race, the most voracious of all idols. And how many
devout Jews endured such a death? On that most horrible day, even among all
those other bad days, when the child witnessed the hanging (yes!) of another
child who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind
him groan: “For God's sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice
answer: “Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.” On the
last day of the Jewish year, the child is present at the solemn ceremony of
Rosh Hashanah. He hears thousands of slaves cry out in unison, “Blessed be the
Almighty!” Not so long ago, he too would have knelt down, and with such
worship, such awe, such love! But this day, he does not kneel, he stands. The
human creature, humiliated and offended in ways that are inconceivable to the
mind or the heart, defies the blind and deaf divinity. I no longer pleaded for
anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong.
I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone,
terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I
was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this
Almighty to whom my life had been bound for
so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an
observer, a stranger. And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was
there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection
of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child?
What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified
brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I
explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a
cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human
suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the
faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion
Copyright © Hill and Wang
Copyright © Hill and Wang
