Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #3 - Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buna. - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #3 - Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buna.

 

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver.  We are here to look at books that have changed the world and can even change us.

 

And I’m Garry Shriver; this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  This is our third episode featuring the great Dr. Elie Wiesel and his holocaust memoir Night. In episode one, we discussed Wiesel’s life story spanning the many years of his life before but then after the holocaust. We highlighted the impact this man has had on planet earth as an advocate for peace.  He stands out among the greatest advocates for peace in the 20th century, the most genocidal evil century in the history of our planet,  and he spoke of the necessity of man as a matter of survival to forgive: to seek Morality and ethical values, to honor the sanctity of human life, and to pursue the wisdom to distinguish between evil, revenge and justice.

 

Last week, we went back in time to Sighet and listened to little Elie as he introduced to us his friend Moshe the Beadle, his family and his world.  We watched his world shrink smaller and smaller until he and his family were confined into a cattle car- where they ironically LONGED to reach their final destination- the ultimate situational irony, a place they had never heard of, a place the world must never forget, Auschwitz.  But, Garry, the story is so so sad.

 

 

Well, it’s incredibly sad.  And there is a part of me that rejects wanting to even know about this.  It’s horrible and is a reminder of evil.  Yet, Wiesel, as a writer was absolutely obsessed with memory.  His greatest fear was that one day humanity would forget about the holocaust.  We would white wash it, pretend it didn’t happen, or change the way it happened in our collective memory to make it something it wasn’t.  He wanted the make a mark through the written word to fight that.  But that leads us to an incredibly important question historians who study the holocaust discuss and that is what should we take away from the study of the holocaust. 

 

Well, for starters, memory of any kind- be it personal or collective- is an incredibly powerful part of being human.  There are so many reasons why we treasure memory.  You and I love to travel and a lot of that has to do with the culmination of memories it creates in my head and heart.  Some of my favorite memories of my children’s lives are from trips we’ve taken together.  I think about remembering my mother who died many years ago, when I hear certain songs or even eat certain foods, I remember her, her love, the lessons she taught me. 

 

Yes- and there you are getting closer to its greater purpose.  Memory serves to help us extract lessons for the present and help project  us into the future, and THIS clearly is Wiesel’s purpose for recording the personally painful events of his life- the most painful of these will be in the chapters we read this week and next.  He isn’t the only one Saul Friedlander says that the memory of extreme events carry them an ethical imperative. – meaning survivors MUST.

 

 Another thing, as far as writers and survivors go, these witnesses, such as Wiesel and Friedlander among others who have recorded horrific events seem to agree that the memory, the recording of it, is their tool for combating an apathy towards human history that can naturally develop in a comfortable existence when things like that may feel like encyclopedia entries. It’s one thing to say that Kubla Khan or Julius Caesar were ruthless.  It’s another thing for a witness to tell his/her story of what that means.

 

You are exactly right.  And here we see why public memory or especially collective memory matters.  Memory gives people a tool to resist destructive things sometimes ones that are even natural at the present moment. And this can be practical, helpful.

 

That seems all good for historians, but for non-history people, sometimes I have to wonder-  What is the point?  Why not forget?  Wouldn’t Wiesel have been better off to, as they “put all this behind him”?  Wouldn’t we, as a culture- to just let it go?  Auschwitz is so horrific- such a symbol of the capacity for evil living in man.   Do you think stories such as these should be remembered- or is it glorifying it- giving it a place when it doesn’t deserve one.  I know there’s the cliché- those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it?- to not be guilty of this sort of thing ever again?  Is there validity to that.

 

Yes- I think there is.  Although, honestly that’s only one part of it.  And I will also concede this, historians are not in agreement if that cliche is even true all the time.  Sometimes memory creates things like feuds that go back, tribal conflicts that last generations- and things of that nature.  It’s so difficult to understand what to do with our memories. 

 

How should we let them orient our future is not so simplistic .

 

  We don’t understand what it means.   Again back to the great holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, he points out that the Nazi regime was unique among all genocides because they took it upon themselves to envision and technologically construct a world through killing so as to determine a set of criteria by which they should determine which group should be allowed to live on Earth- and they industrialized this process.  It is incredible when you think about it.  They pursued this goal with such commitment that this goal became more important than winning world domination.  In fact, they actually reversed the normal order of affairs.  World domination was the tool to annihilate, not the other way around.  How can we ever decide to make sense of this?

 

So, what we have is to hear the story.  In Wiesel’s case, I think it is clear that he, through his story, wants to prolong the memory of the tragedy- give it voice beyond his lifetime, that not just his, but all of the victims experiences can be known.  He writes to make future generations the storytellers of his story. Grown up Wiesel found this so incredibly important it was worth his own reliving of it again and again- through the retelling.  And what I found so fascinating about this little narrative, the book night, is that it is purposeful at every point.  He writes in a style that is understated, but his message is powerful.  He is very selective in the different episodes he chooses to include in his retelling of his experiences at Auschwitz. There were so many things that happen.  All of them awful- remember his first book had over 800 pages.  Yet, in Night he chooses only a few. There are so many people he watched die; yet he highlights really less than a handful.  There are many survivors, people he encountered, yet he tells us of one or two.  And even more noticeable, his perpetrators are not honored.  He mentions Mengele by name as well as one Kapo, but the rest are anonymous. 

 

 

True- and this stands out because the events he relays are incredibly gut-wrenching, if he wanted to, he could have gotten a lot more gruesome.  What we know  about the atrocities of Dr. Mengele alone has filled volumes of history.  But he doesn’t do this.  He mentions that he was there.

 

 

This story, and I really think this is important, does not glorify or even magnify the tragic way innocent people died in killing centers- this is not the story through the eyes of the perpetrators of evil- Night is not about evil- although evil pervades every page of this book   This is about resistance to evil.  This is about the idea that no one, no matter how evil they are, no matter what atrocity they create, and there is no greater atrocity than the holocaust- but no one can take your humanity- which to me is an amazing thought after having just discussed the metamorphosis and kafka’s idea about how you can take away your own.  What we learn in this story, is that, in their way, the inmates at Auschwitz- even in their worst hour, expressed incredible agency.  They fought back in their hearts, in their minds and Wiesel is careful to point this truth out.  It’s important to see this.  Look especially at his discussion of religion.  Incredibly, God dwells in Auswchitz.  It’s absolutely incredibly how deeply spiritual this book is at times.  The theologian Rabbi Sacks, speaks about his experiences talking to holocaust survivors.  He says there were people who lost their faith at Auschweitz, there were people who kept their faith, there were people who found faith in God at Auiswhcwitz.  Wiesel introduces us to all three of these groups in this story, yet he doesn’t tell us what we should think of it.  He expresses divinity through humanity as he shows us what love is through the relationship with his father, what strength is through Juliek, what courage is through the French girl at Buna, and what kindness is by the strange men who come out to the train and tell Elie and his father to lie about their age.  And he juxtaposes this with evil.  From the minute the Wiesel’s  arrive we see humanity- we clearly see evil and inhumanity inhumanity- but the spotlight is on humanity.  Holocaust survivor George Pick says this, “I am here because some people who were taking chances with their lives, but also others who were doing seeming small things, gestures. Opening a door, letting us out….I want to put this into your minds that you don’t have to be heroic necessarily to be life-savers or to help others.  You can do small things and you would ever even know what the consequendes of those small things are.”

 

 

Chapter 3 starts with utter confusion, darkness and sadness.  The saddest line in the whole book is at the beginning of chapter 3.  “I walked on with my father, with the men.  I didn’t know this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.” 

 

 

It’s incredibly quick- it’s overwhelming -and yet, it’s immediately dismissed as they were dismissed and of course, it is at this moment we see an instance of incredible human compassion and agency of those there- inmates telling then to lie about their ages.  Say you’re 18; say you’re 40.  The wiesel’s had no idea, and it’s hard to imagine how they even viewed this enormous place known as Auschwitz.

 

 

The size of Auschwitz is much bigger than we can envision by simply reading this book. There are 44 parallel railway tracks that convene- probably why it was chosen.  Well, let me even back a little before that.  First of all, we need to know that Auschwitz was not the only place where Nazis were exterminating Jews.  There were six death camps- all of them in Poland.  These places weren’t camps- they were killing centers- the business of the camps was to manufacture death.  It is set up exclusively to create mass murder of human beings like an assembly line.  In these places, those who are selected out for survival are only selected out in order to support this industry.  Jews were a minority in the concentration camps but more than half of the Jews killed during the holocaust were killed in killing centers, not concentration camps.  I make this distinction because there were other slave labor camps or concentration camps besides the death camps.  Auschwitz was actually originally a slave labor camp that was retrofitted to become a death camp.  What we have at Auschwitz is a massive operation beyond what any person could ever conceive.  At its peak in the summer of 1944, Auschwitz I (ONE) covered about 40 sq. km. in the core area, and more than 40 branch camps dispersed within a radius of several hundred kilometers. In 1944, there were about 135 thousand people (105 thousand registered prisoners and about 30 thousand unregistered) in the Auschwitz complex, which accounted for 25% of all the people in the entire concentration camp system.

 

Elie arrives in what we know now is Auschwitz 2 or Birkenau.  Later we see after he’s selected he is moved to Auschwitz 1 and then on to Buna. 

 

 Auschwitz 2 or Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the entire Auschwitz complex. Auschwitz stands out because the scale of what went on here is beyond anything that happened at the other killing centers.   It only existed really for three years.  In October  of 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942.  Ultimately, what we know now, is that in its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where some prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to slave labor camp, if that was going to happen at all, but The majority—probably about 90%—of the victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp died in Birkenau- the total is around 1 to 1.2 million people. And of course, we know now that The majority, more than nine out of every ten, were Jews. 

 

This is one of the few places where Wiesel highlights a perpetrator, the infamous Dr. Mengele the one in charger of what they called “selection.”Menele held a conductor’s baton telling some to go to the right; others to the left.  No one knowing what it meant.  In Elie’s and his father’s case, they were sent to the right which meant they were spared.  But as they walked to the bunker they were given a good look at what Birkenau was about in 1944.  They passed a ditch while a truck was unloading children and babies and thowing them into a bonfire.  Elie comments that he didn’t think of it as being real.  His father was in disbelief as well.  They were looking at evil. And notice that at this moment, Elie references the response of the victims. They life their voices in prayer, “Ysgadal, Veyiskadah, shmey raba….May His name be celebrated and sancrified.”  There is this very gripping line, “Someone began to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.  I don’t know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.”   An incredible moment- men taking hold of their own sacrament of death- transcending death in a sense.  Elie’s father was praying as well.  Of course, Elie didn’t want to pray.  He was angry at God- how colud God be silent?  How could you pray to God in the face of evil.  It’s not an easy question to ask, especially for religious people.  Maybe for Non-religious people, maybe one could say, it means nothing, but for many theists, and for Jews- this answer is not enough.  It can’t explain evil and it can’t provide an answer for it.  Wiesel and his father than remember Mrs. Shaechter on the train, she seemed to have known. 

 

Evil is really characterized by two things- first for something to be evil there is this idea that it lacks necessity- there is no reason for it- and we feel this.  What is the point of a killing center?  Secondly, it is voluntary.  These perpetrators were not being forced- they were voluntarily digging ditches, processing inmates, industrializing death.  Modern materialistic thought doesn’t really like to think that there is such a thing- that this could be possible.  Many of us want to say that people aren’t really evil, they just do bad things out of necessity.  We can wrap our brain around that.  Just like it’s not evil when a lion eats a deer.  It’s sad, but not evil.  We’d like to argue that humans work like this- that if someone steals they nust have a good reason for it.  Maybe they were hungry; maybe they had some reason.  But what we see here is not that.  They go to the barber, the SS arbitrarily hit them randomly at all times for no reason.  They are forced to run everywhere although there is no hurry.

 

Well, of course we would like to believe that there could be an explanation, in some sense because it gives us hope that if we could just cure the inequalities of the world, we wouldn’t have to be afraid of evil.  We could perhaps cure evil.  And it seems that Wiesel and his father look around we see they are stunned by the fact that there is no reason for this.  There is no necessity.  And yet, so many people are volunteering to participate- from the train conductors, to the SS, to the doctors, even to the Kapos- who were prisoners themselves chosen mostly because they too were evil.  And then there is that iconic infamous sign “Albeit Macht Frei.”

 

Elie like Thousands of prisoners passed the Auschwitz Gate twice every day. First time, early in the morning, when they were going to work and the second time, when they were coming back, often carried by friends because of extreme fatigue. Every morning they glanced at the “Arbeit Macht Frei” – it was an insidious Nazi joke.  Everyone was aware every time they went under  it could be there last time to pass this gate. Work which was said to liberate them, was in fact bringing a premature death. The Auschwitz gate never led to freedom – only to pain.  The words were actually a pun.  The words “Arbeit Macht Frei”, “Work Will Free You”, is taken from the Bible which says “Wahrheit macht frei” (Truth will make you free). In early 30s the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” was very popular because of high unemployment level in Germany. It became a  motto of Nazi officers who forced prisoners to work in inhuman conditions. Eventually the slogan appeared over the gates of many extermination camps, not just Auschwitz.

 

And it is here after going through this sign that Wiesel records another instance of humanity.  They had arrived at their Block, Block 17, and their block leader gives them this admonition.  He says this, “Comrades…read page 41.  

 

Elie is one of the lucky ones, or so he’s led to understand.  He gets taken out of Birkenau, sent to Auschwitz where he just hangs out for three weeks doing pretty much nothing but sleeping.  After which he’s sent to what we now call Auschwitz 3 or Monowitz- Elie knew it as Buna. 

 

Ironically, and I quote, “All the inmates agreed Buna is a very good camp. One can hold one’s own here.”  And this seems to be somewhat true.  Elie makes friends: Juliek, Yossi and Tibi (brothers). They would hum melodies about Jerusalem together, if you can imagine it.  They were given a blanket, a washbowl, a bar of soap.  Their Block leader, named Alphonse, was kind and sometimes smuggled in extra soup if he could manage it.  It is at Buna where Elie meets a French girl who gave him a crust of bread after he’d been severely beaten by one of the few perpetrators Elie gives a name, Idek the Kapo. 

And what is even more incredible about that incident is that he flashes forward to a metro in Paris where he runs in to her again.  They recognize each other, get off the train and talk about what happened that day.  She had risked her life to give him that bread.  The Germans didn’t know she was Jewish, she was blond and was passing herself off as Aryan, but if they had heard her talking to him, she would have been busted.  As George Pick said, and it stays with me- heroism is in small things.  We just never know. 

 

For Wiesel it was both shocking and troubling  that the Germans, of all people, should have been the ones who implemented the most savage national crime in recorded history. They were rich, educated, sophisticated, artistic, cultured, arguably the most cultured the most literate  in the Western World.  The way they created this industry of death was done in such an organized and sophisticated way.  They stood in court yards and were counted- death was carried on with such ceremony.  This is highlighted by the two hangings Wiesel recalls (of course there were many hangings- he says no one ever weeped to watch people get hanged.  They had all but gotten completely comfortable with the presence of evil and death, but he selects these two to discuss.  There was one Oberkapo (or overseer) who they had caught hiding a significant amount of weapons.  He was fighting back.  He was hanged along with his assistant, a child who helped him, but when the child went to hang, he was so light, he wouldn’t die.  As was the ceremony, all the inmates had to pass by the dead person hanging to remind themselves what happened to traitors, when Elie walked passed this Pipel he was still alive. 

 

He agonized over this issue of culture and evil and raises again and again. It seems natural to assume that education and culture would make people more humane and kind.  But Wiesel learned in the camp that there is no correlation between education, culture and good and evil.  We’re going to see that even in his Nobel address he can’t resolve this troubling issue- as he said “all of those doctors in law or in medicine or in theology [the German officials in the camps], all of those lovers of art and poetry, all of those admirers of Bach and Goethe who, coldly, intelligently had ordered the massacre and had participated in it: what was the meaning of their metamorphosis? How does one explain their loss of ethical, cultural, religious memory?”  He further remarks in another piece that “many Germans cried when listening to Mozart, when playing Haydn, when quoting Goethe and Schiller—but remained quite unemotional when torturing and shooting children.” Even he was unemotional at this point in the camp. 

The last part I want to discuss today, as we finish up our discussion of Elie’s time at Auschwitz before he is moved to another camp has to do with his treatment of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  The two most sacred days in the Jewish calendar.  Rosh Hashanah is the first of the high holy days. It’s the Jewish New Years and is celebrated in what in the Northern Hemisphere is in the fall.  It commemorates the creation of the world and starts, a 10-day period of introspection and repentance that culminates in the Yom Kippur holiday, also known as the Day of Atonement. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the two “High Holy Days” in the Jewish religion.

 

Elie expresses rage really as he hears everyone discuss the Event of Rosh Hashanah- the end of the year.  The others were praying.  Elie is angry.  Elie narrates that and I quote, “some ten thousand men had come to participate in a solemn service, including the blockalteste, the kapos, all bureaucrats in service of death.”  There is an officiating inmate who leads them “Blessed be God’s name.”  Elie says that “thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm.”  It’s just incredible. 

 

 

And Elie angry.  He says this, “And I, the former mystic, was thinking, “yes man is stronger, greater than God.  When Adam and Eve deceived you, You chased then from paradise.  When you were displeased by znoah’s generation, you brought down the …read page 68. 

 

The evil Elie saw at every moment through the billowing clouds of smoke, felt with the blows, heard from the kapos and SS, and smelled in the burning carcasses wasn’t about need, evolutionary competing interests.  It wasn’t about ignorance or lack of sophistication.  Evil couldn’t be explained nor combated through education or money.

And although Elie couldn’t understand it or even see it- what he was witnessing were people fighting the evil.  Resisting the evil- not being consumed by it.  And it is truly remarkable that many survivors from the holocaust bring out this truth of resistance through love, forgiveness, redemption, this connection to the divinity.  But what are we to make of it?  Elie is just telling us what he saw.  He can make nothing of it, it seems. 

 

  Clearly.  And there is more tragedy and pain yet to come.  Next week, we’re going to talk about his last days at Buna, the evacuation in what history has called the “Death marchs” as well as Elie’s liberation from Buchenwald.  But, I want to end this episode with some of the most famous words he probably ever writes. He writes these back in chapter 3 right after they arrive at Birkenau.  Garry will you read these for us?

 

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.1

 

It’s what we call an anaphora- when you start every sentence with the same word or group of words.  Repetition always means emphasis- when you repeat something- it’s always because that’s the most important thing- obviously.  We repeat the things we want to memorize.   In this case there are seen repeated uses of the phrase “Never shall I forget..”  This is the main idea.  Never forget.  He will never forget.  We must never forget.  He is entrusting us with these images.  The number seven is s sacred number.  It’s the number of the divinity.  This passage is in reference to God, but it’s defihitely negative.  He’s not praising God like his father had done.  He’s not cursing Ggod either.  It ends with a paradox- Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself, never.  He doesn’t want to live as long as God- in one night a boy full of life and hope is destroyed.  But yet we know, that really Wiesel doesn’t end his life with despair.  He doesn’t forget, but God is not murdered.  His soul is not murdered.  The power of evil can go only so far and no further.  And there is hope in that. 

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