“Into That Night.”

Why? It is a fair question our brains always want the answer to. However, in this blog post, I am going to attempt to answer Elie Wiesel’s question “Why did I write it?”(Wiesel vii) This question is not easy to answer nor will my answers be one hundred percent what Wiesel was thinking when he wrote Night, but for my curiosity, I need these questions answered. 

When I first started reading this book, I didn’t per norm start with the preface instead I read through the whole book before doubling back to read this part. I heard one of my group mates saying that she does this so I decided to try it out and I am glad I did. “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”(Wiesel vii)? This phrase is said in the preface and if I had read it before reading the book I probably would have looked for signs of madness or the path to staying away from the madness consuming him.  Webster’s dictionary defines madness as “A state of severe mental illness.” However Wiesel did not show signs of madness in the text, his reality was not slipping, things made sense, and his words were not words written by a mad man. Perhaps the madness in this text isn’t in the man himself, but in us reading the unbelievable things he went through. Although madness is an easy assumption to make I do not believe he wrote this book out of madness. And, that is why I did not look for these things; instead I looked for things like the Narrators, addressees, and reading the relationships between them. 

Does the text work to interpellate an actual reader to become a submissive reader of the narrative? Yes, for me it was easy to fall into the role that the text asked me to play. For example: “Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn’t find him! 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”(Wiesel, 106). He is asking us to be ashamed of him and to deem him guilty because he feels that way about himself. He basically wishes his father would die so he could be relieved of the responsibility of taking care of him and he asks us as readers to answer the question: Am I guilty? With yes you are, and in this part of the text it is hard not to tell him he is guilty. However, he also uses word usage, grotesque sights and smells described, and heartwrenching scenes, but also the way the text is asking us to view the situation. For instance “The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal…”(Wiesel, 11) Writing this in the book he is asking us to look at this situation in two ways: One, he wants us to look at this text from the innocence of himself and his family. They did not know what was going to happen to them. They did not realize that the yellow stars would be used to signal them out to be controlled and tortured. The second way he wants us to look at this is to understand where they came from and the way they had to adapt to their situation. They had to do awful things to survive.  Viewing this text as being written out of guilt and mental strain has helped me step into this role. Wiesel says that he doesn’t know why he wrote it, but I beg to differ: I think he knows why he wrote the book, but maybe it’s easier to tell everyone he doesn’t know why he wrote it than to tell them every single reason he did write it. He intended that the audience could absolve him of the guilt that he feels for surviving over other people that he believes deserved it more than he did. In the preface, he says “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” (Wiesel vii). He is suffering from the guilt of surviving a tragedy when others were not as lucky and the only way to stop thinking about it is to put it down on paper and also to “Bear witness”(Wiesel viii). To what happened. However, he is not just suffering from this form of guilt he is also suffering from the guilt of not being able to protect his father. In fact, he dedicates the book to his mother, father, sister, and grandparents. On the first page of the book, he writes vanished into that night meaning all of his family members who perished during his journey through the different camps and places they were forced to. 

Webster’s dictionary defines guilt as: “Feelings of deserving blame especially for imagined offenses or from a sense of inadequacy” The reason Wiesel writes this confession is because he feels guilt from surviving, from not being able to protect his father, and guilt from not forcing his family to leave when they had the chance. He feels that he needs to be punished for the guilt that he feels. However, another reason for this confession is that one meaning of guilt is “debt” Wiesel feels that he owes his life to some people that treated him with kindness, or helped him out in the camps. However, how can you pay off a debt that is too high? Maybe write a book about what happened to stop this from happening again?

With all of the guilt, he feels he also feels responsible to make sure this doesn’t happen again. At the end of the preface, he writes “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”(Wiesel xv). He wrote this text so that everyone has a chance to see what they went through and try to keep it from happening again. He does not want other children to suffer the way he did and witness their family members dying or disappearing from their lives.

In Night Wiesel writes about a girl he meets, a girl who he believed was Jewish but wasn’t sure because she could easily pass for Aryan. They met in Buna, in Poland which was probably the best place they worked and was why the girl was lucky. She had false papers and could pass as Aryan because they were not forced into places like Auschwitz. Later in his life, Wiesel met the girl again in Paris and she said to him: 

“I know what it is: Am I Jewish…? Yes, I am. From an observant family. During the Occupation, I had false papers and passed as Aryan. And that was how I was assigned to a force labor unit” (Wiesel 54). 

This interaction leads me to believe that a part of Wiesel also wrote this text for people like that girl so they could read it and feel maybe a little guilty but mostly grateful. He is addressing this woman and wants her as the reader to feel these emotions and maybe tell him who it feels to be lucky.

Reading this book made me realize that this could have happened to anyone, the only reason it was Jewish people was people projected all of their hatred on those people. But, I think that is what Wiesel was trying to say with this text. Not only could it have been anyone, but it also should make the audience feel grateful for not having to go through what Wiesel went through. “The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (Wiesel 115). That is why this text makes you look at the situation from a fixed set of values so you can easily submit to your role. Wiesel left himself open to receive punishment for the guilt he feels because he feels like he did not do enough. However, he also allows the reader to believe their own opinions about why the book was written. This means people can learn different things from this book leaving kind of open-ended for the reader to interpret their own reasonings.