Night by Elie Wiesel – Social Justice Challenge

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.  – Elie Wiesel

When I read Holocaust literature as a teenager, I was always the strong determined character who beat the odds and survived.  Tragedy provided a background for my heroic actions as Miep or Corrie Ten Boom.  Motherhood changed all that.  Now I’m the mother who can’t stop the Nazis from forcing her child to dig his own grave.  The mother who trods with so many others in peaceful lines to the gas chambers holding my child’s hand.  Or the very worst, I’m Sophie and I have to choose.  Claire won’t read Holocaust literature anymore, it’s too painful.  I completely support her choice.  If a book comes up that deals with the Holocaust, I quietly warn her to skip it.  But as painful as it is for me to read these stories, there is a part of me that believes if millions of people had to live and die this horror, then the least I can do is witness it in some small way.

My greatest honor as an attorney was the opportunity to work with Bet Tzedek to assist Holocaust survivors in obtaining the “Ghetto Pension” [an aside, if you know if a survivor who has not applied for the 2,000 euro Ghetto Pension/ZRBG pension, please contact Bet Tzedek to determine eligibility, today].  From my limited exposure, it appeared that the survivors who were alive today were swept into the Nazi system late in the war when they were teenagers.  Not too young or too old to fall victim to the selections, strong enough to survive until the war ended within the next 12 to 18 months.  And they barely survived.  My teenage visions of bravery were more illusory than I thought.  Elie Wiesel’s Night supports my very unscientific theory.

The Nazis arrived in Wiesel’s village in Transylvania when he was fifteen.  His experience paralleled so many of the stories I heard as an attorney.  First the community is forced into one or two designated areas, ghettos.  Then after a period of time the ghettos are cleared out and the inhabitants sent to concentration camps.  The Wiesel family is shipped via cattle car to Birkenau.  Immediately separated from his  mother and sisters, never to see his mother and youngest sister again, Wiesel took his father’s hand and entered hell.

Weisel was stripped of everything, his clothing, his hair, his dignity, all freedom of choice, his humanity, and most difficult for me to read, his faith.  In many ways his story is similar to many other Holocaust memoirs.  What sets Night apart, what actually glows amidst all of the terror, is Wiesel’s relationship with his father.  They live to keep the other alive.  Even after Wiesel loses all of his faith in God, on the verge of death himself, Wiesel prays that he will have the strength to be a good son.  Night is a Holocaust memoir, but it is also Weisel’s struggle with accepting how he acted as a son.  I read their story and wonder at what a blessing he was to his father, but it’s not my opinion or anyone else’s that Weisel needs to reconcile himself with, it is his own.

The Social Justice Challenge picked religious freedom as the topic to explore this month.  It motivated me to pick up Night which had been sitting on my bookshelf since my last visit to the Museum of Tolerance [another aside, here's my adventure taking teenagers to visit the Museum of Tolerance for Kids Off the Couch] .  What is most impressive about this Challenge is that participants agree to actually do something related to the monthly topic at least three times a year.  My activity for this topic was a lecture I gave at my daughter’s middle school Global Studies class about applying for Holocaust reparations and working with Holocaust survivors.  The students were reading the Maus books in English and had just learned about German war reparations after WWI.  I talked to them about the various Holocaust reparation programs and what the survivors I worked with had to prove to obtain the Ghetto Pension.  When I asked for questions at the end, there was just silence, which made me wonder if I bored them.  Then came an onslaught, all quizzical, not quite understanding one point or another, trying to make sense of a system that is inexplicable.  I answered their questions, and left knowing they, like the rest of us, will have to grapple with a horror  for which there isn’t any justification, no excuse, no sense  and no ability to make whole.