Documents on Elie Wiesel | ||||||
Night and the
Holocaust: Things
written, things not written, and things altered --
some observations on the received version of the
Holocaust in the light of Elie Wiesel first book in
non-Yiddish. By Robert
E. Reis, BA, MA This paper is
an analysis of Elie Wiesel's memoir Night
as a piece of historical evidence
regarding the events now described as the
Holocaust. Elie
Wiesel (1928-
) is a French-American author, whose work
addresses Jewish themes, including the
experiences of Jews who suffered in Nazi
concentration camps during World War II.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for
his work promoting human rights.. From
1980 to 1986 Wiesel served as chairman of
the U.S. President's Commission on the
Holocaust. he is the author of a well
known book, Night, often prescribed as set
reading for students. According to the
publisher of the 1987 edition,
HarperCollins Canada Ltd, the United
States Library of Congress classifies
Night under the headings "Biography" and
"World War 1939-1945 -- Personal
Narratives, Jewish." This book is not
supposed to be fiction. ELIE Wiesel's famous book
Night was first
published in French in 1958 and in an English
translation in 1960. (All our quotations here are
from the edition contained in The Night
Trilogy published by Hill & Wang, New York,
1987.) It is not suspposed to be fiction. According
to Encarta® Online: "Wiesel's first book,
Night (1958),
describes his experience at Auschwitz. Subsequent
works include many novels and a book of memoirs."
In a 1979 essay, "An Interview Like Any Other," Mr.
Wiesel wrote that he published his memoir La
Nuit after a 10-year vow of silence only at the
urging of Mauriac, whose account of his meeting
with the young survivor appears as a foreword to
"Night's" French and
English editions. [Italics added.] What can we learn about the Holocaust from
Night? Elie Wiesel dedicated
Night to the memory of
his parents and his little sister. Mr. Wiesel introduces us to the horrors of what
will later be called the Holocaust with the story
of Moché the Beadle. In 1942 this man is
deported from Hungary along with many other
non-Hungarian Jews who had been living in the
Hungarian town of Sighet where the Wiesel family
had its home. Several months later he re-appeared
in Sighet and told his neighbours that his entire
transport had been murdered by the Germans after
crossing the frontier into Poland. Nobody believed
him. Mr. Wiesel also tells us that the Jewish people
of his town regularly followed the war news
broadcast from London. Since we know that the
United Press was already distributing charges made
by the World Jewish Congress in London as early as
June 1942 that the Nazis were executing thousands
of Jews each day in Poland and that in December
1942 the allies had issued a joint declaration
condemning Germany's "bestial policy of
cold-blooded extermination," one must assume that
news items like these must have been broadcast from
London to the Jews of Sighet. We also know that In
August 1943, the United Press distributed an
accusation by the Inter-Allied Information
Committee in London that stated the conditions at
Auschwitz were
"particularly severe" and that "58,000 people were
believed to have perished" there. The Jews in the
Hungarian town seems to have ignored or disbelieved
these charges. Mr. Wiesel tells us that as late as the spring
of 1944, in the fifth year of Hitler's wars, the
Jews in Hungary could still obtain emigration
permits for Palestine, but that his father had
refused to sell his business interests in Hungary
and "start from scratch in a country so far away .
. . " Apparently the government of the Regent
Admiral Horthy, the ruler of Hungary, had
been following a rather benign policy toward its
Jewish citizens even though Hungary was allied with
Germany and was contributing troops to the war
against the Soviet Union. In that spring of 1944, with German armies being
pushed relentlessly out of the Soviet Union and the
Allies preparing to land at Normandy, the Regent
accepted the formation of new government led by the
Hungarian fascist party, the Nyilas, and this
government permitted German troops to enter
Hungary. The Nyilas government quickly introduced a
series of increasingly harsh measures aimed at the
Jews: restrictions on movement and employment,
ghettoization, and finally the wearing of the
Jewish star. Much of what Wiesel describes sounds like
organized thievery of Jewish property by the
Hungary fascist police organization. Finally it was announced that the entire
community in which the Wiesels lived was to be
deported. The reason given was that the front had
moved too close to their town. Wiesel tells us that
in fact the Jews in their Ghetto were anticipating
the arrival of the Red Army and the overthrow of
the Hungarian fascist regime. The round-up and deportation was in the hands of
the Hungarian police with the assistance of the
Jewish police that had been recruited by the
elected Jewish Council that had run the ghetto. Instead, the Wiesels entered the cattle cars for
a journey to an unknown destination. It was only after two days, when the train
crossed the frontier into what had been
Czechoslovakia, that German officials took charge
of the transport and the Wiesels realized that they
were leaving Hungary. During these two days, Wiesel asserts that the
young Jews packed eighty to a car with
grandparents, parents, and small children "gave
away openly to instinct, taking advantage of the
darkness to copulate in our midst . . . The rest
pretended not to notice anything." He tells us that one Jewish woman in their
cattle car went insane and screamed over and over
again that she saw "fire" and "flames." First she
was restrained; later she was beaten to
unconsciousness by her neighbours. They arrived at Auschwitz at night. As anyone familiar with the standard histories
of the Holocaust -- Reitlinger, Hilberg,
Dawidowicz -- knows, arriving Jews at Auschwitz
were forced to endure a "selection" by SS-doctors.
We are told that only the healthy Jews were
admitted to the camp in order to become slave
labourers and that the old, the very young, the
infirm, and the women with small children were sent
to the gas chambers. Mr. Wiesel tells us that upon arrival he could
see "flames gushing out of a tall chimney into the
black sky" and that he could smell "an abominable
odour floating in the air." "We had arrived -- at
Birkenau, reception centre for Auschwitz." Perhaps Mr. Wiesel did see flames gushing out of
a tall chimney; however, the sight of flames
gushing from a coal-fired crematorium chimney is
not seen very frequently, or at all, outside of
narratives describing Holocaust crematoria. A
crematorium is not a blast furnace. Mr. Wiesel tells us that he turned on the
reception platform and saw an old man fall the
ground and a nearby SS-man putting away his pistol.
He implies, but does not say that the SS-man had
just shot the old Jewish man. Elie Wiesel was advised by one of the veteran
Auschwitz inmates to say that he was eighteen years
old instead of fourteen; his father was advised to
say he was forty instead of fifty. There is a
strong implication that the inmate believed that
the consequences of being too young or too old
would be dire. The people on the Wiesel transport were asked by
veteran prisoners why they had not hanged
themselves rather than allow themselves to be
deported to Auschwitz. The prisoners were amazed
that the Wiesels -- as late as 1944 -- had never
heard of Auschwitz. This is odd. Elie Wiesel has told us that the
Jews of Sighet had been listening to Allied radio
broadcasts. Walter Laqueur, the Director of
the Institute of Contemporary History in London,
wrote in his 1980 study, The Terrible
Secret, that Auschwitz was "a veritable
archipelago," that "Auschwitz inmates . . . were,
in fact, dispersed all over Silesia, and . . . met
with thousands of people," and that "hundreds of
civilian employees . . . worked at Auschwitz," and
that "journalists travelled in the General
Government [German administered Poland] and
were bound to hear," etc. London had to have had a
pretty good idea about conditions in Auschwitz. After being told by veteran inmates that they
would ultimately be cremated at Auschwitz, some of
the younger Jews wanted to revolt, to escape, to
tell the world about Auschwitz. But they
didn't. The newly arrived Jews from Sighet were first
separated by sex. Dr. Mengele makes his
first appearance in
Night. He is on the
reception platform determining where the arriving
men from Sighet will be sent. He sent Elie Wiesel
and his father "to the left." We are told that a prisoner warned Elie and his
father that going "to the left" meant that they
were being sent straight to the crematory. The
prisoners information was not correct. The Wiesels
were being sent to a reception barracks. Since the men who were sent "to the right" were
all neighbours of the Wiesels and were sharing a
common ordeal with them, it would be helpful in the
evaluation of the credibility of rumours spread by
prisoners to know if the men sent "to the right"
were immediately killed or not. Unfortunately Elie
Wiesel did not discover their fate -- or he has
chosen not to include this information in
Night. On the way to the barracks Mr. Wiesel reports
that he saw flames from a "gigantic ditch" into
which the Germans were dumping babies from a lorry.
"I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes . . . those
children in the flames." And he reports: "A little
farther on was another and larger ditch for
adults." As anyone familiar with the training of
psychiatrists knows, psychiatrist are taught to
suspect dishonesty when a patient voluntarily and
emphatically suggests that something is really,
really true. This is the only time in
Night that Elie Wiesel
insists upon his own veracity in such an emotional
manner. That first night was the night that "has turned
my life into one long night." In the reception barracks the Jews were forced
to strip naked and allowed to retain only their
shoes and their belts and their heads were shaved.
As anyone familiar with the standard histories of
the Holocaust -- again, Reitlinger, Hilberg, and
Dawidowicz -- knows, Jewish prisoners were force to
disrobe and to have their hair shaved off before
they were forced into the gas-chambers. We now
learn from Elie Wiesel that it was the standard
practice to force all new arrivals to disrobe and
to have their hair shaved off. Meanwhile SS officers selected the strongest to
work in the Sonderkommando, the unit that worked in
the crematoria. Then the new arrivals are marched
naked to be disinfected, given a hot shower, and
issued uniforms. But Reitlinger, Hilberg, and Dawidowicz tell us
that the gas-chambers in which the Jews were
exterminated by means of cyanide released from the
crystals of the insecticide Zyklon-B were located
in the cellars of the crematories in Birkenau. The
Jewish men in the Sonderkommando were forced to
live isolated in the crematories and help in the
cremation of the bodies of the people gassed in the
cellars. The gassings themselves are normally
described as an important secret of the Nazis. Mr. Wiesel now tells us that a Jewish man,
Bela Katz, who had been deported from Sighet
the week before and who had been selected to work
in the crematoria managed to get a message to the
newly- arrived prisoners. He tells them that he had
already had to burn the body of his own father.
(About how the elder Mr. Katz died we are not
told.) This event does suggest that the isolation
within which the men of the Sonderkommando are said
to have worked was not always successful in
preventing even a brand new prisoner from
communicating with the prisoners outside of the
crematories. Elie Wiesel and his father were assigned to one
of the barracks formerly occupied by Gypsies at
Birkenau. About the fate of the previous occupants
there is not one word in
Night. This is odd.
Most histories of the Holocaust tell us that the
Gypsy section at Birkenau had been exterminated in
dramatic circumstances order to make room for the
influx of Jews from Hungary like the Wiesels. This
is especially odd since we will soon meet in
Wiesel's book prisoners who had been in Auschwitz
for years. They would have known. Odder still is the fact that Elie Wiesel now
introduces his recollections that a brutal Gypsy
deportee was in charge of the barracks to which he
and his father were assigned and that this Gypsy
knocked Elie's father to the ground with a blow.
Later, ten more Gypsies with whips and truncheons
will escort the new arrivals out of the Birkenau
camp to the separate Auschwitz main camp. It is reasonable to believe that the Gypsies
would have had a powerful interest in knowing the
fate of the rest of the Gypsies at Auschwitz. Yet
there is nothing in
Night to tell us about
the reported extermination of the Gypsy section at
Birkenau. Before being admitted to Auschwitz I, the
original concentration camp at Auschwitz and still
the centre of the administration of the Auschwitz
camp tourist complex, the Wiesels were forced to
take another hot shower. Showers, Mr. Wiesel informs us were "a
compulsory formality at the entrance to all these
camps. Even if you were simply passing from one to
another several times a day, you still had to go
through the baths every time." Mr. Wiesel never
tells us why the Germans insisted on all of this
cleanliness. It seems logical to conclude the shaving of the
hair, the disinfection, and the compulsory hot
showers were hygienic measures mandated in order to
prevent the spread of diseases among the
prisoners. Mr. Wiesel and his father were assigned to Block
17 -- a two-story building made of concrete. Elie
tells us that there were gardens among the
barracks. It was only after being transferred from
Birkenau Camp to the Main Camp that Mr. Wiesel
became prisoner "A-7713." -- his camp tattoo
number. This fact tells us that prisoners only
received an official identity after they had
survived a period of quarantine at the Birkenau
camp and had been assigned to a more permanent
destination within the Auschwitz complex. Here the "Wiesel of Sighet," the author's
father, was searched out by the husband of his
wife's niece, the "Stein of Antwerp." The "Stein of
Antwerp" had been deported in 1942 and wanted news
of the wife and sons he had left behind in Belgium.
The Wiesels had not received any letters from
Antwerp since 1940. Elie Wiesel tells us that he
lied to his relative and told him that his mother
had received news that her niece and the boys were
fine. The "Stein of Antwerp" was grateful for the
news and began sharing his food rations with the
Wiesels. Since the "Stein of Antwerp" had been
deported so long before the Wiesels, and he was
both a Jew and a relative by marriage, he might
have been an excellent source of information about
Auschwitz and what had been happening there.
Whatever he told the Wiesels, it is not in
Night. At the end of the Wiesel's three weeks in the
main camp, a transport from Antwerp arrived. The
"Stein of Antwerp" sought it out for more news. He
never came back to see the Wiesels. Elie and his father were re-assigned to the Buna
Camp, a large chemical factory and concentration
camp that was part of the Auschwitz complex of
camps. German guards marched the Wiesels "slowly"
to the Buna factory camp. There they were required to undergo another hot
shower and they were quarantined for three days
before given any work assignments. Mr. Wiesel does not tell us that the purpose of
the Buna plant was to manufacture synthetic rubber.
The Allies were desperately interested in
information about artificial rubber production
because Japan had over-run much of the rubber
producing territory in the world. Allied
intelligence would have wanted to know what
happened at this crucial German enterprise. Here he tells us that there were children in the
Buna factory camp and that some senior prisoners
gave "bread, and soup, and margarine" to the
children. He adds that some senior prisoners
recruited children for homosexual purposes. Next, a
three-doctor panel gave each new prisoner a medical
and dental examination. "Anyone who had gold in his
mouth had his number added to a list." The Wiesels were assigned to the barracks that
contained the camp orchestra and to a unit of
prisoners that worked in a warehouse for electrical
equipment under the direct command of a prisoner
named "Idek." Standard histories of the Holocaust tell us that
there was an orchestra at Auschwitz that played
music while Jews were "selected" for the
gas-chambers. We are also told that the
gas-chambers were in the cellars of the
crematories. The Buna camp was entirely separate
from the camps in which crematories are known to
have existed. The purpose of an orchestra in the
Buna Camp is not explained in
Night. The musician's barrack was under the supervision
of a German Jew. Each prisoner was issued a
blanket, a wash bowl, and a bar of soap. Since Elie Wiesel had a gold tooth, he had to
deal with a Jewish camp dentist who wanted his
tooth. Soon the dentist was arrested by the Germans
for running a traffic in contraband gold teeth.
Elie kept his gold tooth for a while longer. Since Mr. Wiesel always identifies persons
mentioned in Night by
their nationality and identifies them as "Jewish"
when applicable, it is odd that all of this
information is omitted about "Idek." Since all
standard histories of the Holocaust explain that
the prisoners at Auschwitz always wore emblems on
their clothing that announced their classification
or cause of incarceration: politic prisoner,
conscientious objector, common criminal,
homosexual, etc., and that Jewish prisoners had an
unmistakable emblem sewn on their uniforms; Idek's
Jewishness or lack thereof would have been
immediately apparent to all of the other inmates.
Perhaps the circumstance that "Idek" was engaging
in a consenting sexual relationship with a gentile
girl led our author to omit "Idek's" religion. Mr. Wiesel tells us that the Jewish prisoners
were working along side of non-Jewish prisoners as
well as "civilian workers." The "Idek" incident
shows that the relations between prisoners and
"civilian workers" could lead to intimacies in
which confidence are frequently shared. Soon, Frank, "the Pole," Wiesel's foreman at
work, became aware of the unremoved gold tooth. He
persecuted Elie's father until the boy agreed to
give it up. |
Poseur:
Elie
Wiesel, survivor; author of book:
"Night",
about his horrible sufferings at the hands of the
Nazis; speaking fee: $25,000 per lecture plus
chauffeur-driven car
The
Wiesels were deported in the second transport from
their town. For three days after the first
transport had left, they lived on in a ghetto
awaiting transport. Wiesel tells us that "the
ghetto was not guarded. Everyone could come and go
as they pleased." The Wiesels even refused an offer
from a former Gentile servant to hide them in her
village. Despite listening to the broadcasts from
London, it is clear that the Jewish population of
Sighet had never heard or never seen any reason to
believe that Germany and its allies were following
a policy of physically exterminating the Jews of
Europe.
Mr.
Wiesel tells us that he was beaten twice by "Idek."
The first time, he was beaten for no reason at all.
The second time, he was beaten for discovering that
"Idek" had made his entire command work on Sunday,
apparently a standard day of rest for the prisoners
in the Buna complex, so that Idek could have a
sexual interlude with a Polish girl at the
factory.
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to David Irving