Night
by Elie Wiesel
Preface to the New Translation
by Elie Wiesel
IF
IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one book, this would be the
one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night,
including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes,
profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read
this very first of my works.
Why did I write it?
Did I write it so as not to go mad or,
on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature
of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history
and in the conscience of mankind?
Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories,
to help prevent history from repeating itself?
Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal
I endured as an adolescent, at an age when ones knowledge of death
and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature?
There are those who tell me that I survived in
order to write this text. I am not convinced. I dont know how
I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle?
Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why
not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance.
However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival.
Was it to protect that meaning that I set to paper an experience in which
nothing made any sense?
In retrospect I must confess that I do not know,
or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know
that without this testimony, my life as a writeror my life, periodwould
not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral
obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory
by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.
For today, thanks to recently discovered documents,
the evidence shows that in the early days of their accession to power,
the Nazis in Germany set out to build a society in which there simply
would be no room for Jews. Toward the end of their reign, their goal changed:
they decided to leave behind a world in ruins in which Jews would seem
never to have existed. That is why everywhere in Russia, in the Ukraine,
and in Lithuania, the Einsatzgruppen carried out the Final Solution by
turning their machine guns on more than a million Jews, men, women, and
children, and throwing them into huge mass graves, dug just moments before
by the victims themselves. Special units would then disinter the corpses
and burn them. Thus, for the first time in history, Jews were not only
killed twice but denied burial in a cemetery.
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his
accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children,
but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore
Jewish memory.
CONVINCED THAT THIS PERIOD in
history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also
knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to
say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language
became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent
a new language. But how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed
and perverted by the enemy? Hungerthirstfeartransportselectionfirechimney:
these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant
something else. Writing in my mother tongueat that point close
to extinctionI would pause at every sentence, and start over and
over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent
cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was it?
It was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being
usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale,
lifeless. Was there a way to describe the last journey in sealed cattle
cars, the last voyage toward the unknown? Or the discovery of a demented
and glacial universe where to be inhuman was human, where disciplined,
educated men in uniform came to kill, and innocent children and weary
old men came to die? Or the countless separations on a single fiery night,
the tearing apart of entire families, entire communities? Or, incredibly,
the vanishing of a beautiful, well-behaved little Jewish girl with golden
hair and a sad smile, murdered with her mother the very night of their
arrival? How was one to speak of them without trembling and a heart broken
for all eternity?
Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now,
that his testimony would not be received. After all, it deals with an
event that sprang from the darkest zone of man. Only those who experienced
Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.
But would they at least understand?
Could men and women who consider it normal to assist
the weak, to heal the sick, to protect small children, and to respect
the wisdom of their elders understand what happened there? Would they
be able to comprehend how, within that cursed universe, the masters tortured
the weak and massacred the children, the sick, and the old?
And yet, having lived through this experience,
one could not keep silent no matter how difficult, if not impossible,
it was to speak.
And so I persevered. And trusted the silence that
envelops and transcends words. Knowing all the while that any one of the
fields of ashes in Birkenau carries more weight than all the testimonies
about Birkenau. For, despite all my attempts to articulate the unspeakable,
it is still not right.
Is that why my manuscriptwritten in Yiddish
as And the World Remained Silent and translated first into
French, then into Englishwas rejected by every major publisher,
French and American, despite the tireless efforts of the great Catholic
French writer and Nobel laureate François Mauriac? After months
and months of personal visits, letters, and telephone calls, he finally
succeeded in getting it into print.
Though I made numerous cuts, the original Yiddish
version still was long. Jérôme Lindon, the legendary head
of the small but prestigious Éditions de Minuit, edited and further
cut the French version. I accepted his decision because I worried that
some things might be superfluous. Substance alone mattered. I was more
afraid of having said too much than too little.
Example: in the Yiddish version, the narrative
opens with these cynical musings:
In the beginning there was faithwhich is
childish; trustwhich is vain; and illusionwhich is dangerous.
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived
with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred
spark from the Shekhinahs flame; that every one of us carries in
his eyes and in his soul a reflection of Gods image.
That was the source if not the cause
of all our ordeals.
Other passages from the original Yiddish text had
more on the death of my father and on the Liberation. Why not include
those in this new translation? Too personal, too private, perhaps; they
need to remain between the lines. And yet . . .
I remember that night, the most horrendous of
my life:
. . . Eliezer, my son, come here . . .
I want to tell you something . . . Only to you . . . Come, dont
leave me alone . . . Eliezer . . .
I heard his voice, grasped the meaning of his
words and the tragic dimension of the moment, yet I did not move.
It had been his last wish to have me next to
him in his agony, at the moment when his soul was tearing itself from
his lacerated bodyyet I did not let him have his wish.
I was afraid.
Afraid of the blows.
That was why I remained deaf to his cries.
Instead of sacrificing my miserable life and
rushing to his side, taking his hand, reassuring him, showing him that
he was not abandoned, that I was near him, that I felt his sorrow, instead
of all that, I remained flat on my back, asking God to make my father
stop calling my name, to make him stop crying. So afraid was I to incur
the wrath of the SS.
In fact, my father was no longer conscious.
Yet his plaintive, harrowing voice went on piercing
the silence and calling me, nobody but me.
Well? The SS had flown into a rage
and was striking my father on the head: Be quiet, old man! Be quiet!
My father no longer felt the clubs blows;
I did. And yet I did not react. I let the SS beat my father, I left him
alone in the clutches of death. Worse: I was angry with him for having
been noisy, for having cried, for provoking the wrath of the SS.
Eliezer! Eliezer! Come, dont leave
me alone . . .
His voice had reached me from so far away, from
so close. But I had not moved.
I shall never forgive myself.
Nor shall I ever forgive the world for having
pushed me against the wall, for having turned me into a stranger, for
having awakened in me the basest, most primitive instincts.
His last word had been my name. A summons. And
I had not responded.
In the Yiddish version, the narrative does not
end with the image in the mirror, but with a gloomy meditation on the
present:
And now, scarcely ten years after Buchenwald,
I realize that the world forgets quickly. Today, Germany is a sovereign
state. The German Army has been resuscitated. Ilse Koch, the notorious
sadistic monster of Buchenwald, was allowed to have children and live
happily ever after . . . War criminals stroll through the streets of Hamburg
and Munich. The past seems to have been erased, relegated to oblivion.
Today, there are anti-Semites in Germany, France,
and even the United States who tell the world that the story
of six million assassinated Jews is nothing but a hoax, and many people,
not knowing any better, may well believe them, if not today then tomorrow
or the day after . . .
I am not so naïve as to believe that this
slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience
of the world.
Books no longer have the power they once did.
Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent
tomorrow.
THE READER would be entitled to
ask: Why this new translation, since the earlier one has been around for
forty-five years? If it is not faithful or not good enough, why did I
wait so long to replace it with one better and closer to the original?
In response, I would say only that back then, I
was an unknown writer who was just getting started. My English was far
from good. When my British publisher told me that he had found a translator,
I was pleased. I later read the translation and it seemed all right. I
never reread it. Since then, many of my other works have been translated
by Marion, my wife, who knows my voice and how to transmit it better than
anyone else. I am fortunate: when Farrar, Straus and Giroux asked her
to prepare a new translation, she accepted. I am convinced that the readers
will appreciate her work. In fact, as a result of her rigorous editing,
I was able to correct and revise a number of important details.
And so, as I reread this text written so long
ago, I am glad that I did not wait any longer. And yet, I still wonder:
Have I used the right words? I speak of my first night over there.
The discovery of the reality inside the barbed wire. The warnings of a
veteran inmate, counseling my father and myself to lie about
our ages: my father was to make himself younger, and I older. The selection.
The march toward the chimneys looming in the distance under an indifferent
sky. The infants thrown into fiery ditches . . . I did not say that they
were alive, but that was what I thought. But then I convinced
myself: no, they were dead, otherwise I surely would have lost my mind.
And yet fellow inmates also saw them; they were alive when they
were thrown into the flames. Historians, among them Telford Taylor, confirmed
it. And yet somehow I did not lose my mind.
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 publics 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 nations 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 dont 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.
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