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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us January 23, 2006 Case In Point : Elie Wiesel Hold on to the story of ‘Night’ Much in the news of late has been the brouhaha regarding the memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey, selected last fall by Oprah Winfrey’s book club. It is a graphic and compelling account of Frey’s time in a drug and alcohol rehab center. When Frey’s work was recently vetted by an online investigative Web site, it found that some sections of the book were embellished, a fact which Frey acknowledged when he appeared recently on Larry King Live. He pointed out that a memoir is far more personal than, say, a well-researched and documented autobiography. A memoir, he insisted, as a genre, offers far greater latitude to the writer. Winfrey has since defended Frey saying that “the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me.” The key words in Winfrey’s statement are “the underlying message,” for clearly, in a memoir, while it is based on truth, not all of it can be true. Conversations quickly grow dim, moments become elusive when recalled over a span of years, and events that were linear are often reordered. And so, while the author stands before the reader saying, this happened; this is true, he or she is also conscious that though the central commitment is to write the truth, what is written is filtered through the gauze of time. As if to make her point regarding the synergistic impact of a memoir, Winfrey recently announced that the book club's most recent selection is the memoir, “Night,” written by Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. It is the account of his experience in the Nazi death camps during WWII. It is a courageous and important choice. Wiesel has acknowledged that “Night” has been referred to as fiction, perhaps, he speculates, because of its literary style. But Wiesel, author of 47 books, insists that he makes a clear distinction between what he lived through and what he imagines others to have lived through. What Wiesel lived through is unimaginable, and his words fill every page of “Night” with a tortured lament. He recounts being transported with his family — his mother and father and small sister — in 1944, from the small town of Sighet, in Transylvania, first to Birkenau, then to Auschwitz and finally to Buchenwald. He was 16 when his journey began, profoundly religious, an innocent whose view of the world was shaped by the embrace of his family and by his study of the Talmud and the mysteries and revelations in the Kabbalah. Placed on cattle cars so crowded they could do no more than stand, shoulder to shoulder, he and his family began the inexorable trip that would take them into the night, into a darkness so complete that it would shroud all of the days and years that followed. It was at Birkenau that he watched his mother walk away, prodded by the SS, holding the hand of his sister, her small frame pressed against her mother’s side. He would never see them again. Holding the hand of his father, terrified to ever let it go, he saw in the distance the chimneys of the crematoria, smoke and ash drifting into the sky, and watched, as if in a dream, small children, babies, being thrown into a ditch of fire. “I pinched myself. Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No, all this could not be real.” In a sense, what Wiesel so eloquently describes seems but a dream. How can it be otherwise? How to explain the profound evil and brutality of it all: the days of starvation, of beatings and hangings and extermination that followed as he slowly walked down a long, dark corridor of such barbarism and depravity that it defies ultimate explanations. For Wiesel it was also a crisis of faith. How, he asks himself, can a God that was righteous and just and kind allow such a place to exist? How can those of profound religiosity explain the presence in the world of such malevolent evil? These are questions that have haunted the devout and buttressed the argument that if there were a God, he or she could never offer a credible rationale for the iniquity which was crystallized in the death camps of Nazi Germany. How does God answer a young boy, barely sixteen, who is dying in slow motion, as is his father, who looks toward the heavens and asks, Why? How can this be? As well, the holocaust reduces the idea of an intelligent designer to rubble, revealing it to be specious, vacuous. If all that we are and see and experience is part of some grand and endlessly complex design, then explain the ovens at Auschwitz and the mass graves at Buchenwald in terms of design. Wiesel describes watching a young boy being hanged by the SS and then hearing a voice behind him, 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.’” The selection of “Night” by Winfrey’s book club is courageous and important, for it focuses our collective attention on events that must never be forgotten. If there is one abiding reason why Wiesel wrote “Night” it was to bear witness, to insist, to plead, that we never forget. For, as was said in the stunningly beautiful and tragic French film about the holocaust, “Night in Fog,” those who placed the men and women and children on the transports, who stripped their captives (and themselves) of their humanity, will be ever with us, there, in the night and in the fog. Waiting. We must never forget. Case in Point is a weekly editorial column designed to provide in-depth commentary on current events. 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