Excerpt of Night by Elie Wiesel
(Page 4 of 4)
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BEFORE CONCLUDING this introduction,
I believe it important to emphasize how strongly I feel that books, just
like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.
Earlier, I described the difficulties encountered
by Night before its publication in French, forty-seven years
ago. Despite overwhelmingly favorable reviews, the book sold poorly. The
subject was considered morbid and interested no one. If a rabbi happened
to mention the book in his sermon, there were always people ready to complain
that it was senseless to “burden our children with the tragedies
of the Jewish past.”
Since then, much has changed. Night has
been received in ways that I never expected. Today, students in high schools
and colleges in the United States and elsewhere read it as part of their
curriculum.
How to explain this phenomenon? First of all,
there has been a powerful change in the public’s attitude. In the
fifties and sixties, adults born before or during World War II showed
a careless and patronizing indifference toward what is so inadequately
called the Holocaust. That is no longer true.
Back then, few publishers had the courage to publish
books on that subject.
Today, such works are on most book lists. The
same is true in academia. Back then, few schools offered courses on the
subject. Today, many do. And, strangely, those courses are particularly
popular. The topic of Auschwitz has become part of mainstream culture.
There are films, plays, novels, international conferences, exhibitions,
annual ceremonies with the participation of the nation’s officialdom.
The most striking example is that of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C.; it has received more than twenty-two million
visitors since its inauguration in 1993.
This may be because the public knows that the
number of survivors is shrinking daily, and is fascinated by the idea
of sharing memories that will soon be lost. For in the end, it is all
about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is
clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living.
He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to
our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive;
to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
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.
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.
E.W.
Copyright © 2006 by Hill and Wang,
a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
