Light on a dark area

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33609, 10 August 1974, Page 10

Light on a dark area

Night, Dawn, the Accident By Elie Wiesel. Robson Books. 318 pp. For all those who now believe that the decades of concentration camps and crematoria are better forgotten as the human mind cannot encompass their hottor, this book pierces like a shaft of light illuminating that dark area that is gradually becoming dimmer. The author entered Auschwitz and Buchenwald Camps at the age of 15 with his family from a small village in Eastern Europe where they had lived happily. He had intended to become a rabbi and his greatest joy had been to discuss possible academic ways to tempt the Messiah to come back to mankind

From this he is suddenly with thousands of strangers being killed and tortured as a matter of course, trying to stay beside his father but finally pleased when the latter dies without fuss and is no longer a burden. Released, he moves on to Palestine under British domination and describes his long night of waiting to shoot a British officer hostage as a reprisal for the execution of a Jewish liberation fighter. The changing of roles from victim to executioner forges him even more strongly into a machine, this time working for the survival of a cause rather than self. The final shot into the head of the Englishman who he has come to appreciate in the few minutes ofacquaint-

anceship leave him drained of the vestiges of his humanity at the age of 18. In the third section, now as an adult journalist in America, Wiesel suffers a motor accident. In hospital whilst unwilling to fight for his life he starts painfully and gropingly to investigate his feelings once more. He sees himself as ashamed to have survived as one of the living dead, tied completely to the nameless, faceless people who lived in the universe of dead souls. All of existence and love is imbued with his strong feeling of guilt. God, he concludes, is interested in man only as i puppet with which to i-nuse himself for a short period.

This book is intensely moving without any varnishings of sentimentality or unnecessary horror. It expresses in the clearest way on the deep scars left in every survivor of the concentration camps As Wiesel says: “You have to watch them care fully when they pass by an innocent looking smokestack, or when they lift a piece of bread to their mouths, something in them shudders and makes you turn your eyes away. These people haven’t been amputated: they haven’t lost their legs or eyes, but their will and their taste for life. The things they have seen will come to the surface again sooner or later, and then the world will be frightened and won’t dare look these spiritual cripples in the eye.”