Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #2 - Irony And The Journey To The Camps - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #2 - Irony And The Journey To The Camps

 

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver.

 

I’m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  This month, we are learning from one of planet earth’s greatest advocates for peace, the holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.  Last week, we spent the entire episode discussing his life and really his calling which is a bit unusual for us.  Because, even though we always discuss historical context of any author and piece of literature, Wiesel’s story deserves a closer and more developed look.

 

True, and in some sense we didn’t even scratch the surface.  There is a lot to unpack and a lot that we, as humans, truly NEED to absorb from this great man.  So, today, we are going to begin the process of unpacking this very short but powerful account of one of the modern world’s most inhumane moments.  And there is a lot to process.  Beware that there is a lot of historical context, so these episodes really do lean towards a historical discussion agaom more so perhaps than a literary one, but in this case, I think it’s worth it.  So, I truly don’t want to dawdle or take away another minute because we have a lot of ground to cover.  It starts with young 13 year old Elie.  He starts his story by telling us about a gentle wonderful homeless  devoutly religious Jewish man who was known as Moishe the Beadle, a hack of all trades in a Hasidic house of prayer in a small town in Translylvania.   Garry, how to we  understand what that means?

 

Well, there are a lot of different things going on in the world that require us to understand a little bit of context.  First let’s start with Judaism.  Judaism is the world’s oldest monotheist religion.  It’s older than Christianity and Islam which are also monotheist religions.  Judaism is over 4000 years old.  It is also very different from Christianity because it’s more than an accepted system of beliefs- although it definitely involves what you believe about the nature of the world.  But Judaism  is an ethnic religion- which for many Western people is a foreign concept.  For most in the West, one’s religion is one thing and one’s ethnicity although often may be the same as those in your church- are not intertwined.  For this reason it’s not dangerous or even unusual for Western people to change religions- Justin Bieber has recently done that; Brittany Spears has done that, Kanye West has done that- and that’s just on the North American continent- we just don’t think of religion as a cultural identity.  Of course Judaism isn’t the only religion that is deeply connected with a national or historical heritage. Islam or even to some degree Buddhism has a strong ethnic component.  With Judaism this ethnic heritage is even deeper because the Jewish community for so many hundreds of years didn’t have its own homeland or a physical space- so to be Jewish in many ways, meant to be genetically connected, historically connected, culturally connected and religiously connected.  The heritage is rich, it is old and it is traditionally complex which takes us to the case in Hungary- which if you remember from last week is in Eastern Europe. The Jewish community, although they were definitely Hungarian they were never going to be Magyars- which is the larger Hungarian ethnic group.  And when it came to the Nazis and the squeeze they put on the country, the loyalty to protect everyone created a conflict with one’s own need to survive.  The story of the Jews in Hungary is strange even compared to other holocaust stories as we will see- and this was studied for five decades by the Holocaust historian Randolph Braham if you want to really get into the historical details.-

 

Well, jumping back to little Elie and Moishe- one thing that many don’t understand is that just like in Christianity which has an enormous number of different groups with the religion- the Catholics, the Baptists, the Presbyterians (which is our group, btw), the Pentecoastals, the Orthodox churches-  There are many different sects within Judaism- and although they share the same Sacred Text and have many common beliefs, how they practice their faith is very different and we see this in this first sentence.  Moishe was a Hasidic Jew, but Elie is an Orthodox Jew.  And although for non-Jews that doesn’t mean much, for Elie it was important.  Hasidism was a mystical movement.  It was a smaller group.  It’s connected to Kabbalah and seeks to understand the essence of God.  It talks about the connection between sacred text and experience.  It talks about intimacy with God- the mystery of the ways of God.

 

And it’s especially important that Wiesel starts his book introducing us to this idea because this is one of the looming questions of the book.  It was at the forefront of Wiesel’s mind.  It’s one of the most important motifs which goes through the narrative- and if you remember what that means- it means he keeps coming back to religion in every chapter.  It haunted him for years after it was all over.  What about the essence of God could possibly co-exist with a place such as Aushwitz.  How could an omniscient, omnipotent Diety ever exist in the face of such evil?  Can Judaism explain this?  Can the Torah or the Bible? Maybe Diety itself was just a human construct like people like Kafka were inclined to believe. But at the same time- big or Grown up author Wiesel is reminding us in the first paragraph of his book about death that this connection between flesh and spirit is essential to living well on Earth. Wiesel wants to present this to us in the form of a man.  In the form of this beautiful man, Moishe.

 

Well, Wiesel didn’t really use that word to describe him.  He calls him “awkward as a clown”, He’s absurdly skinny or “waiflike” and socially awkward. 

 

That’s true- physically- beautiful probably  isn’t an inaccurate description.  But he’s so endearing and brave and selfless.  Elie sees this intuitively and is drawn to him.  In chapter 1, Elie is a 13 year old teenager and defines his identity first and foremost as an observant practicing Jew.  He studies the Talmud all day (which is the an extremely important source of Jewish religious and at the heart of the Jewish community).

 

Exactly, Elie is a practicing Orthodox Jew which we need to contrast for a modern audience with reform Judaism.  If you are a non-religious person or a Christian, these terms may sound foreign- and we don’t have time to really get into the details.  If you are reading this book as a class, understanding these elements would be a great research assignment.  But to generalize, as with all religions, some groups are more traditional, others are more liberal.  Just to keep it simple and generalized, a reformed Jew would be  more liberal than a conservative Jew who would be more liberal than an Orthodox Jews who would be conservative but there is even a range there, but a Hasidic Jew would be an even smaller group within the Orthodox side.  In the United States only about 10% of Jews consider themselves Orthodox.  This number is twice as high in Israel, which makes sense. 

 

The takeaway here is that at age 13, Elie is very serious about his faith- and in fact, as we saw last week, really wanted to go to Israel and eventually did so.  He comes from a conservative and observant family and he wants to go even more observant than that.  So much so that his father tries to hold him back some from getting too much into it. 

 

And the book starts with Elie’s relationship with this homeless man  who is clearly very very intelligent.  And he’s willing to talk to him about the mystical door to knowing God even more.  The word “Shekinah” means the present of God.  Ellie wants to feel God’s presence and he seeks that.  He pursues that.  But Moishe the Beadle has a problem.  He is poor, he’s weird, he’s homeless, and he’s also a foreigner and because of this was crammed into a cattle car and taken away- and incredibly everyone just discounted it.  That sort of thing happens- at least that is the thinking that Elie expresses as the common view of the community- which makes total sense.  There is one quote that Elie specifically remembers and records, “What do you expect?…that’s war….”  There is such irony in that remark which we’re getting ready to talk about. 

 

Well of course- the irony is that knowing the end of the story does nothing to relieve the tension.  It actually increases it.  In this case, Moishe the Beadle survives and returns to Sighet to recount the most absurd and horrific story imaginable.  He vividly describes what today we all know is documented fact recorded by the perpetrators themselves.  Jews being forced to dig large holes in the ground and the Gestapo shooting their victims one at a time, tossing infants into the air as target practice for machine guns, all being dropped into the freshly dug trenches.  It’s 1942.  It’s a story so unimaginable that it is completely ignored- but we as readers know it’s all true.  And it’s ignored for two solid years.

 

For me that is the power of chapter 1- the slow passing of time, 1941, 1942, 1943 and then 1944.  Although, Wiesel never says this one tnme, the message is undeniable- we should have and could have left.  Even as late as 1944 Sighet is thriving.  There is discussion in the Wiesel household of immigrating to Palestine, but his father isn’t interested.  Ellie calls it being ruled by delusion. 

 

Of course there are reasons for this- that are well beyond the understanding of a child living it, but now we know.  If you look at a map of Eastern Europe, you will see that Hungary is in kind of a bad spot.  It borders Germany directly.  And of course, we can look back and judge decisions that were made, but that is the arrogance of the present inserting itself, so we don’t want to do that.  And the details of what happened in Hungary are definitely complicated, but the bottom line is this- Hungary, as early as 1938 was a full-fledged ally with Germany and had already established many anti-Jewish laws.  And this is an over-simplication- but because of this- Germany really wasn’t in a super-hurry to annihilate Hungarian Jews.

 

Kind of like, we can do that anytime- we’ll do the other more difficult countries first. 

 

Something like that.  And the results were good- where in other places in Eastern Europe, like Poland, the Jews were being systematically annihilated. Hungary was able to protect most of its 825,000 Jewish citizens- the exception being the foreign Jews and this is what we see here with Moishe.  That’s what makes it possible to understand why by 1944, the Hungarian Jews haven’t left yet when they’ve had five years to do so.  It was delusion.  And unfortunately, when things begin to happen, all the elements are there to make things happen quickly. 

 

Wiesel is quick to point this out even through this childlike narrarator, little Elie.  Budapest radio announces that the Fascist party had seized power.  The next day German troops penetrate Hungarian territory.  Three days after that, German soldiers were in the streets of little Sighet and quartered in homes of Jewish families who ironically fed and hosted them.

 

And what Elie doesn’t know, or even any Jewish adult, is that their fate had already been decided.  In March of 1944 there were 750,000 Jews in Hungary.  By July 440,000 had been deported to Auschwitz.  By the end of the war, that number goes to 570,000.  And this doesn’t even start to happen until the very end of the war- remember DD is June 6th  1944.  The surrender of the German army is May 8th, the next year.  So, by this point, the German defeat was obvious, the secret about the genocide was mostly exposed in many corners of the world, even many Jewish leaders in Budapest knew exactly what was going on, but as we see through Elie’s eyes, the understanding of regular people living regular lives was so very different. 

 

Incredibly different, Wiesel even points out that they actually liked some of the soldiers.  One soldier bought a box of chocolates for his “host” family, if you want to call them that since he forced his way into their home.  And here is where I want to talk about the most powerful literary technique in this entire book- Wiesel’s use of irony.  When you hear the word irony- you immediately think of the word “opposite”. Irony means opposite- and of course- we know there are three kids of irony.   The most easily recognizeable form of irony is verbal irony- when I say one thing but I mant he opposite- of which sarcasm is a subset- so if you do something really tacky- and you mom says, “oh that’s cute”- you know probably by her tone that she doesn’t think it’s cute at all- she’s annoyed and it’s the opposite of cute.  So, that’s verbal irony.  There’s another kind of irony that is harder to see and that’s situational irony- that is when a situation is the exact opposite of what it should be- which is what we’re seeing with the chocolate boxes.  Wiesel is pointing out not that the soldiers are nice by giving their host a box of chocolates- they are there to do the opposite of nice- they are literally there to put them in a car, take them to an oven and put them in it- and here we’re talking aobut cholocate boxes- that situation is the opposite of what we should be seeing and that’s irony.

 

Well, and then there’s that third kind of irony which to me is the prominent one in the entire book.

 

For sure.  The entire narrative is built on Dramatic irony- and dramatic irony is when the reader knows something the characters in the story don’t know- and it’s the power of of the dramatic irony that really nmakes this first chapter feel so sad.  We know that Hilda will never find an appropriate match in Sighet.  We know that Moishe is the one telling the truth, we know the German soldiers are not nice, we know they should be doing anything and everything they can to get out of there, and yet they don’t.  And Wiesel’s very understated writing style underscores this delusion by referencing the 8 days of Passover- the last Passover they would spend together as a family.  His mother busily cooking in traditional feast.  The singing that was happening in every Rabbi’s house.  And then on the seventh day of the Passover, they edicts began to come forth- and Moishe leaves forever.

 

The story of Sighet is the story of every Jewish town.  The Germans were systematic.  First they took all their valuables, next they required all Jews to wear the yellow star of David and then they created the ghettos.  In Brahman’s historical record, we find that there were all these deals and deceptions going on between the SS and the Jewish community.  The Jewish leadership was trying to bribe their way to stalling til the end of the war, and the SS were happy to take their money, but the deals that were being made were all lies.  They were moving forward and getting everyone to self-identify, self-isolate in areas that were easy to identify and easy to systematically take out.  It’s incredible how efficient the Nazi system had gotten.  In Poland, where the death camps were actually located, it had taken five years for the Nazis to annihilate the Jews and there had been resistance, most famous in the Warsaw Ghetto.  This was not the case in Hungary. 

 

That’s a good point to make, and if you go to our website, I’ve posted a Powerpoint with pictures that I’ve used to show my classes what this looked like.  But all Jews had to self-identify by sewing a yellow star on their outfits and according to Wiesel, there was a bit of discussion by his parents as to whether this was a good idea.  His father made one of the most terribly ironic statements in the entire book.  He says this, “The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal…”

And of course, as we read that, we know that’s completely the opposite of the truth.  It’s the most lethal thing imaginable because that’s how the Nazi’s knew you were a Jew and if you were a Jew you were to be loaded up and taken away. 

 

And so we are going to see Elie’s world contract.  First he lives in a small town.  Then they are separated and forced to live into two ghettos. All by German design to facilitate the deportation.  And the irony is- the Germans didn’t have to do anything.  The Jews did all the leg work.  They identified themselves, they moved themselves, they even boarded the trains voluntarily. 

 

Now, again let me interrupt, I think it’s worth defining the term “ghetto”, as with all language, this is a term who’s meaning has evolved since 1944.    A ghetto, like what Wiesel is talking about is a part of the city, a neighborhood where Jews are legally forced to live.  It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s crime ridden- in fact, I would say most of the time they weren’t.  Jews traditionally, even those that are very poor, took great pride in their living quarters and keep them nice.  It’s just that they are forced to live in certain sections.  The Germans didn’t even invent this concept, there have been ghettos where Jews are forced to live for thousands of years.  There’s one that even dates to 1280 in Morocco.  So, when Ellie says they were forced to live in the ghetto- that means that everyone who lived in that neighborhood who wasn’t a Jew had to get out- and everyone who was Jew just had to move in- no matter if they had a house of not.  So, it appears to be pretty chaotic.  The good news for Elie is that he already lived in the ghetto so he didn’t even have to move.  But since he had family members who did not, they had to have family members move in with them.

 

True, and this is where this first person narrator through the eyes of a child enables us as readers to understand that as a kid, this was all strange, overwhelming, scary  but not particularly terrifying- just annoying.  Since they lived on the edge of the ghetto, the Germans made them board up the window that faced the part of town that wasn’t the ghetto, and the relatives were living there- but it’s not really all that scary.  In fact, it was 1944, the Germans were obviously losing, so most people thought this was just a temporary thing.  Kids are still playing in the streets.  They are still celebrating religious holidays..Elie makes this comment, “WE were in Ezra Malik’s garden studying a Talmudic treatise…” it’s like life is just moving on..until his father is called into a Jewish Council meeting and the news is delivered by the Gestapo that the Ghettos are to be liquidated.

 

Of course, we’ve all seen the photos, and if you haven’t, go to Christy’s Powerpoint or google pictures of this, but it’s one of those things that scars the memory of common humanity.  Men and women pack up their own satchels, put their belongings in suitcases and voluntarily board trains where they will be taking to be murdered.  There is no greater irony.

 

And Wiesel highlights two more opportunites to escape that they choose not to. take  Their housekeeper comes and begs to take the children with her to her home (she’s a Hungarian national)- Ellie’s father says no.  Also, a friend of Elie’s father, a police man who was also Hungarian pounded on that boarded window.  He had promised Elie’s dad that he would warn then if it was bad.  He knocked and knocked but they didn’t answer the knock, so they didn’t get to hear whatever warning he had to offer.  Ellie writes these memories as they must have haunted him.  There were so many missed opportunities if you look back them and he highlights them. 

 

Wiesel illustrates through his description of the. Liquidation of the the ghettos in Sighet what history now understands to have been going on all over Hungary.  The Jewish masses absolutely had no idea about the death camps.  The actual deportations to take place in Hungary implementing Hitler’s Final Solution took only 54 days to complete.  Let that sink in- the SS annialiated 570,000 humans in 54 days.  The majority were going to be murdered shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz- Birkenau.  You want to talk about irony- By the end of these 54 days Hungary will rank third in their genocide of Jews- the only two countries  where Jews experienced greater death were Poland and the Soviet Union- not even Germany itself anniliated as many Jews – I think the number of German Jews to be executed is slightly under 200,000.

 

At the end of chapter 1, Wiesel has this to say, “Two Gestapo officers strolled down the length of the platform.  They were all smiles: all things considered, it had gone very smoothly.”

 

And this transitions us to the transports.  Chapter 2 is Elie’s experience with the transports.  The cattle cars- those awful symbols that have given the world a physical symbol outside of visiting Auschwitz a touch of what they are about.  If you are ever blessed to visit Washington DC and the Holocaust museum, they have one you can walk inside.  There’s another one in Dallas, in St. Petersburg, Florida- for those of us in the United States.  And of course there is famed World Holocaust Rememberance center, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.  There may be other museums that have them, I just don’t know about them.

 

 

When I have live classes with students, I read this chapter outloud.  The whole thing only takes ten minutes.  In my room we have drawn the dimensions of the cattle car out of masking tape on the floor, reduced to reflect the number of students in my class (in other words, how it would have felt).  I ask my kids to get all their belongings and get in the car.  I then turn of the lights and the air-conditioner.  And, if you do that, there are a few things you will immediately notice that Elie points out immediately.  First, you can’t sit down.  There is no place to go to the bathroom.  And what we find out when we do this is in class, is that it is almost impossible to resist bothering people around you.  And let me remind you that we are only in the car for ten minutes.  Of course, we can’t pretend to try to replicate the feelings or the experience, but it is through Elie’s simple words, and perhaps through personal inconvenience for a brief moment, our minds can try if not understand to accept what this experience was.

 

Historically, it has all been impossible to understand and even recreate what the German railways or the Reich Bahn was really about.  It remains one of the great mysteries of WW2.  When the Allies entered Germany they discovered millions of files that explained how the Nazis were running this incredible war machine as well as the “Final Solution” to the Jewish Problem, as they called it.  But what happended in regard to the railways was conscipulously absent.  It’s really quite shocking.  The Reichsbahn was one of the largest organizations of the 3rd reich.  In 1942 it employed 1.4 million people- and that doesn’t count the 400,000 workers in Russia or Poland.  Yet, there are no Reichsbahn documents anywhere.  And not a single railway man was ever one of the defendants or even witnesses in any Nuremberg trial, and yet there is no doubt- the holocaust would not have happened without the complete participation of the Reichsbahn.   Year after year they transported millions of Jews to the “East”, as they called it. 

 

I noticed in one article that I read that in one of few memorandas that did survive that a secretary mentioned that Auswchitz must be quite a “metropolis”- that was her word by just looking at the numbers.  And of course, I saw another horrible one that said and I quote, “today there is going to be a new soap allocation.”  So- there is no doubt people knew what was going on and the employees knew what they were doing. 

 

There is absolutely NO doubt whatsoever, the Reischsbahn was a technical structure which insulated it after the war from the responsibility of what happened- but many have rightfully questioned the morality of giving the railway men a pass on their part in the holocaust.  The numbers are staggering, but let’s just think about what happened just in Hungary, there were four Jewish transports dispatched each night.  Each one had about 45 freight cars.  Each train carried about 3000 victims as well as their possessions.  Between the May 14 and July 8 according to Hungarian reports there were 147 transports.  And these were incredibly heavy.    The trains were longer than usual and heavier than usual.  Just that fact alone made them slower than usual.  Plus in order to avoid congestions since the railroads were also being used to carry on war, the trips to the death camps often took out of the way routes that would make the main thoroughfares well congested- there was no need to rush- they were just going to kill them once they got there anyway. 

 

I guess one of the things, I didn’t think about when I first read this book, is that every transport cost money.  The railway, was a business- and the SS were literally their clients. These were business transactions and pricing had to be negotiated and paid.  The price, in case you were wondering, negotiated by the SS was a group fare of half of the third-class rate provided that at least 400 were being shipped.  And how was the SS going to get the money for this?  And this we see in Wiesel’s account.  They paid for the transports out of the money they confiscated from the Jews themselves.  In other words, the Jews paid for their own death train. 

 

With that in mind, I would like to read outloud to you chapter 2.  Even if you’ve already read this chapter, listen to the inside view now having understood the bigger picture.

 

“Lying down was not an option…”

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