Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #4 - The End Of All Things And The Beginning - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #4 - The End Of All Things And The Beginning

 

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

 

I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. Today we conclude one of the most important memoirs to be written in the 20th century- Elie Wiesel’s short narrative, Night.  In our first episode, we focused on Wiesel’s life and career, after the holocaust, as a survivor.  In episode 2, we talked about chapters 1-2, we discussed the Hungarian holocaust in particular and focused on the role of the railways as they enabled the industrialization of death.  Last week we focused on Auschwitz itself.  We talked about Birkenau, the killing centers, and we focused on the events, many evil but also many good that Wiesel highlighted- the way love  and kindness surfaced in  those that survived, and how that actually enabled him to survive.  We highlighted the role of God in the camps, the small acts of kindness perhaps that reflected divinity and literally saved lives- we saw men and women who expressed the power  individuals have within themselves to resist being reduced to a spiritual nothing.  Wiesel highlighted the evil, but also the resistance and humanity or divinity, if you will, in the heart of the inmates.

 

 

Today, we are going to look at the rest of this book, looking at it in a different way- because as bad as it has been so far- it takes an even darker turn.  As we discuss the death marches, Gleiwitz, Buchewald and its liberation, we cannot avoid Wiesel’s emphasis on the malevalence that also resides or hides in all human hearts and is capable of coming out of anyone.  No one can claim any moral superiority in being incapable of great evil- and this seems to be what Wiesel seems to see even in himself at the very end.   I’ve heard the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson say that that’s what PTSD is all about, that it’s about life forcing you to stare into evil, often even in your own heart- and when you see what others but even you yourself are capable of, you are simply knocked off your center of being.  Lots of war poetry shows us this same thing, (we even talked about this a little bit when we did discussed. Dulce and Decorum Est,  because obviously many soldiers look at evil- things they had done or others had done that they just didn’t believe humans could do to each other and it is deconstructing. 

 

 

World War Two- was certainly deconstructing and really WW2 was just the start of decades of systematic murders all over that the world that deconstructed not just the Western world, but China, Russia, Africa, and other parts of Asia as well.  Truly it’s impossible for us today to understand it.  The numbers are simply too great.  Of course, we can’t talk about all of the 20th century, because just focusing on the events of WW2 is too much for our brains to really comprehend.  More than seventy million people died in that war and, most of them civilians- that means, they weren’t even officially involved in war. 

 

I know this is an aside- but for us non-msth people- numbers like that don’t mean anything- they are too abstract.  There’s a wonderful book by David Schwartz designed to help kids conceptualize how large large numbers are.  And in his book, he makes the point that if you wanted to count to one million, it would take you 23 days to do it.  So think about how many 70 million is. 

 

 

It’s more than we can understand.  And, Of course we know about the assembly lines of death constructed in Nazi killing centers as the Nazi’s systematically sought to annihilate a race of people, but there were more. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, of course we can never forget, nuclear weapons. All of this begs the obvious question of how in the world was such a sophisticated world able to create the kind of dehumanization which enabled or really empowered this much carnage.

 

I’ve heard several lectures from Elie Wiesel, obviously from later on in his life, and one of the observations that he made fairly often, as a way of warning us about how we could do something like is, was to point out characteristics of German behavior during the Nazi era- not to suggest that Nazis were somehow different than the rest of us- but to point out just the opposite.  They are not different, and they certainly were not worse.  He points out how advanced their scientific and technological research actually was.  He points out they had a high understanding and appreciation of literature, art and music.  They were, in many ways, better than many of this- but—none of these things were sufficient to restrain them from behaving inhumanly.  What we see at Auschwitz is strange and counter-intuitive in almost every way.  We see that the Nazis did operate on some level based on values.  They kept everything worth keeping: clothes, suitcases, gold teeth, even hair.  They just didn’t operate on MORAL  values.  They kept everything except human life…and when you listen to Wiesel talk- the word morality comes up over and over again.  The idea of preserving morality in art, preserving morality in politics, preserving it speech matters greatly.  And somehow in Nazi, Germany, this was lost.  And what the end of this book shows- perhaps- among other things- is how this lack of morality has a coldness that increases in the face of its destruction- although you’d think the opposite would occur.  But what we know from this story as well as many many others is that as at the war seemed to be turning against the Germans, their commitment to death did not decrease, in fact it hastened to levels even they had not practiced up to that point. 

 

 

True- and as we know from other accounts, as the war got closer and closer to its conclusion- things in concentration camps all over Poland and Germany got very very chaotic and very deadly. This brings us to Elie.  In January of 1945 the Russian Army began approaching Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.  Of course, in the book we see what was going on inside the camps as the Russians got closer.  What Elie expresses is a strange and ironic excitement when bombs would drop. 

 

 

I’ve thought about that- how strange is the world when you are excited because bombs,which could kill you if they hit you, are your source of hope because they are also your source of liberation.

 

 

True, but look at how the German mindset was even stranger.  We now know that this is literally the last months of the Third Reich.  Hitler will kill himself on April 30, 1945. But even at this late date in January of 45, many Germans still believed that the tide of the war would turn in their favor, and when it did they would need all these prisoners as slave laborers to rebuild all that was being destroyed through these battles.  So, the strategy at Auschwitz as well as other camps across Poland and Germany was to evacuate the prisoners deep into central Germany.  And that’s what they did- this is what Elie and his father were a part of.  The SS evacuated a total of 250,000 prisoners, except they didn’t have the resources to actually do this.  So, they made these prisoners, both men and women, march, and although the Weisel’s march started in Auschwitz, many others started way way before that and by the time they got to Auschwitz to take a break they were almost dead on arrival.

 

 

There is such great irony at this part of the book for me- and of course, I have stopped pointed it out at every point because it would just sound redundant all the time- but at this point it’s worth bringing up again.  Elie had gotten hurt at work totting stones back and forth.

 

 

Let me interrupt here- because it’s worth mentioning- remember how we talked about how evil is often characterized by being pointless- this is a great example of this.  The Nazis were notorious about giving their prisoners tasks that were absolutely grueling as well as pointless.  They would have them literally kill themselves to lift rocks and haul them from one place to another, just to turn around and have them move them back.

 

 

Ugh- well, we’re not were told what exactly the nature of Elie’s work rock hauling work was, although he does allude to his work at Buna as being pretty pointless, anyway, he hurts his foot- and when that happens he has to go to the infirmary- a place that understandably horrified him.  Why would you want to go to a hospital in a place that was completely designed to end human life?  But ironically, it was a good place; the doctor was Jewish, the doctor got his dad in as an orderly, they got good food, he had an operation, his foot was going to heal and while it was healing, he is told he can lay in bed for two weeks.  Heck, he mentions he even had sheets!  However, two days after this happens, came the German evacuation.   He recounts that the patients in the hospital are given a choice- they could stay in the hospital and wait on the Russians or they could be evacuated with all the other innmates and march in the snow to whatever undetermined location they were going. 

 

 

Well, at first pass, that would seem like an obvious choice- stay.  You can be free.  But, after the first thought, you have to have the second thought – and that one would be terrifying- what are SS going to do on the way out the door?  They were already blowing up crematoriums.  Getting rid of evidence of their crimes. It’s clear they didn’t want witnesses- how easy would it be to just shoot everyone in a hospital bed right before walking out?  It’s a gamble, one way or the other.

 

 

And that is clearly what the inmates thought.  There was nothing in the behavior of the SS up to that point to indicate they would spare anyone’s life.   How terrified would Elie have to be at this point>. Because otherwise what else would motivate someone who had just operated on his leg to walk the 55km or 30 miles to Gleiwitz (although I’m sure they weren’t told their destination)- but they knew it was going to be bad. 

 

 

And of course, what Elie was to find out many years later, tragically really, is that had they stayed back they would have lived.  When the Soviets walked into that camp the 6000 sick inmates were still alive and were immediately liberated.

 

 

And so Elie and his father joined the 60,000 plus inmates that were evacuated just from Auschwitz- again the numbers are so big they are larger than we can imagine.  The suburb were our house is here in Memphis, has 58,000 inhabitants- that would mean all of Bartlett was marched out on foot in the snow in the middle of winter- with no adequate coats, Elie didn’t really even have a shoe.  And it is at the end of this chapter on Elie’s last day at Auswhtiz where I see one more passage that illustrates the great power of man’s ability to resist dehumanization- that I want to point out before we start talking about man’s great power to be overcome by evil- but their block leader made them mop the floor of their block before they left it which I find amaxing.  They are about to march in the snow endlessly and instead of preserving their strength they mop, and when asked why he says this and I quote, “For the liberating army.  Let them know that here lived men and not pigs.”  Wow!  Such a testimony.

 

 

Incredible, well the evacuation was unbearably tedious as well as chaotic. They made the half-starved inmates run for their lives and to the incredibly capacity of the human spirit, they did.  They ran, even though the German soldiers couldn’t keep up and switched out- they continued running.  If they saw someone drop off or fall back, the orders were just to kill them.  They ran until they got to Glei Weitz, and from their they were locked in rooms awaiting to be loaded on open cattle cars to the interior of Germany. 

 

 

As I read this part of the book where they run, stop in evacuated barns to sleep and then get up to run more,  I can’t help but have this question in my head- especially as I read about them runnin into the dark of night,  I think why don’t any of them just triy to hide in the grass and let the SS just run pass?  Weren’t the Russians coming?  Wasn’t it dark. 

 

 

That’s a great question, that I think a lot of people have- and actually that did happen some, but not as much as you would think.   John Ranz, another survivor, of the death marches, when he tells his story kind of answers that question.  Because of his place at the camp, he had the unique privilege of reading newspapers that the Nazis were using as toilet paper.  Anyway, (I know that’s gross) but because he read the strips of paper he had access to when he tells his story he talks a little bit about the propaganda that the Nazi media was putting out.  The Media of Germany was not calling the German retreat “death marches” like we’re calling them.   They were calling them “Siegreicher Ruczug” or the “victorious withdrawal”.  The Germans were supposed to believe that the Germans were deliberately luring the Russians deeper into the Reich in order to encircle and completely destroy them.  He states  that he heard Germans shouting to bystanders as they marched by that “All those with machine guns or Panzer Faust units” were to report to the front.  The Panzer-Fausts were regarded as Germany’s great hope to stop the Russian tanks.  And the newspapers were full of stories of soldiers who single-handedly knocked out dozens of tanks.  It wasn’t an accepted fact that this war was over.  You also have to remember, these prisoners saw all the Germans as potential assailants- they understood that most of the people in the area would be hostile towards them- any peasant could kill one of them and likely would.  The prisoners, and you can see this from the way Elie tells his story, felt safer within the confines of the marching prisoners than lost and alone in German territory.  They saw that there was no place to hide even if they escaped the SS.  Plus, and don’t forget this, the German people had great faith in what they called the “Wunder Waffe” or miracle weapon.  It was their belief because Hitler kept talking about it, that any day this weapon would be unleashed and protect them from collapse.

 

 

Can I assume you are talking about the nuclear bomb?

 

 

Yes, Hitler had many physicists working competitively all over the Reich trying to enrich uranium, but obviously they failed.  Of course, if they had gotten that weapon instead of the United States, they may have been right. 

 

 

Well, for the rest of the book, most of the stories that Wiesel recounts are not stories of kindness, but instead illustrations of great and intense evil- beyond even what had happened at Auschwitz.    And not all of them were done by Germans.  Many were done by Jewish prisoners to each other.  He highlights an incident about a young man abandoning his father, the Rabbi Eliahu.  He highlights the SS stuffing the prisoners in cars without covers, over 100 in each one, where they stood for days in the falling snow eating snow off of each other to have liquid in their bodies.  He highlights an account where they would stop at a village and people in the village would throw bread into the car just to watch the inmates kill each other to get a few crumbs of bread.  And kill each other they did.

All of these stories take us to one common theme- and you haven’t even mentioned the one where a man literally kills his own father for a piece of bread- the theme is not  to show us how horrible the train ride was- although that is clearly evident, he has a greater point to make and we know this because It is in the middle of his description of the horrific train ride from Gleiwitz to Buchenwald that he again flash-forwards into the post war are and tells a story of a Parisian woman on a cruise ship.  It seems they are on a cruise in the Middle East, and it stops for one of those excusions  that cruise ships do- this one in  the port city of Aden, Yemen- a very poor country. Grown up Weisel watches this woman throw coins at these poor children who in turn strangle each other to get the coins.  Wiesel is super upset by this, but the woman keeps doing it.  When Wiesel admonishes her- she remarks that she and I quote “enjoys giving to charity”- so you have to ask- what does this story have in common with the wretched cattle car story of Germans throwing bread in the cattle cars to watch the Jews kill each other.

 

 

He doesn’t really tell you in the memoir.  He makes you work for the answer- but, of course, any student of Wiesel knows what he thinks.  Wiesel argues that evil expresses itself first and foremost in indifference.  WE talked about it being voluntary and unnecessary- it’s also indifferent- and it seems to be something that can be in all of us anywhere at any level.  The woman in the story got some sort of pleasure from watching the degradation of the children and she was able to justify it because she was throwing money.

 

 

I agree- it’s a theme we read about , and I have heard not just from Wiesel and even not just from holocaust survivors, but many survivors of 20th century genocides talk about this very deep and disturbing question.  Many raise the question and talk about the challenge of answering it? Why are people so evil?  Where does it come from? 

 

 

Well, we can’t answer that question today.  But lots of great minds have.  It’s at the heart of the book of Genesis in the Bible.  Plato talked about it in the Greek tradition.  St. Augustine the Christian philosopher in his important work Confessions had a lot to say about this- and all of these writers predate the 20th century.  But the 20th century was full of expressions of absolute evil that challenged what we thought we were- what we thought we were becoming.  We had learned how to fly, how to make light, how to communicate across space- but look what we’d done with our advancements. And of course that begs the question- Are we on the verge of destroying ourselves? 

 

 

We have to bring in Alexandr Solzhenitzen here- , he’s another nobel prize winner that I want us to cover in greater depth in a later episode- but one of his most famous quotes that I know about, comes out of the Gulag Arquipelago and to me speaks to what Elie is illustrating here and all over this train ride to Buchenwald.

 

 

Well, before you read his quote, I think it’s worth mentioning that Solzhenitzen was a distinguished and celebrated solider in the Red Army- this very Red Army that we are talking about marching through Poland. And as a soldier he was a murderer himself, he’d done horrible things- all in the name of the war effort- but what happened to him was that Stalin found out he had said disparaging things about Stalin- so Solzhenitzen was sent to the Russian Gulags or the Russian concentration camps.  So, he had the unique experience of being both the perpetrator of evil as well as a victim of it.

 

 

And this is what he has to say:

In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Solzhenitsyn goes on to say:

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

It’s very similar language to what we are going to hear from Wiesel as he talks against ideologies later on in life.  Wiesel was absolutely against and spoke against all ideologies- be it whatever -ism you wanted to give it- and for the reason you just read.  They are great excuses for man to allow that evil to live unrestrained inside his heart. 

The final chapters of this book are about the death of Shlomo Wiesel.  Elie’s father just cannot survive the death marches.  Once they get to Buchenwald it’s just a matter of time before  dynsentery takes his life.  Garry, give us the history and context of Buchenwald, and then we’ll end with the story of Elie’s father’s death and Elie’s liberation.

Sure, Buchenwald is located in Eastern Germany about 150 miles south of Berlin. If you google maps that today, we’re talking about 453 miles if you are driving directly and on highways- even today it would take you 12 hours of solid driving under the best of circumstances to get from Auswhtiz to Buchenwald- and of course we know it took the Wiesels days of being outside in the exposed winter snow.  Technically, Buchenwald was never a killing center- it’s primary function was forced labor.  It was the first and largest of the German concentration camps.  It had no gas chambers, although that’s not to say, lots of inmates didn’t die there- we know that at least 56,545 were documented as dying there.  But let me highlight because I don’t know if we have really, the Nazis established over 44,000 labor camps of one kind or another during the war.  Again these numbers are hard to imagine. And the reason that we even know this is because in order to be so incredibly efficient and create such an intricate system, the Germans, by necessity, had to keep meticulous and enormous amounts of records.  Therefore- as a natural result, even though we see here at the end as they blew up camps, destroyed records and so forth, they were never able to succeed in hiding all the evidence. The German genocide is by far the most documented genocide in human history. Also, and we see this in Wiesel’s book, but also in other accounts, beyond the German records, there was the testimony of many witnesses- and beyond just the tragedy of the death involved- we learned the procedures and organization of these camps- and so we know a lot about these camps.  I know this is an aside, but it’s an aside worth mentioning there was a man by the name of David Boder, a Russian immigrant to the United States and a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, who traveled in 1946 to Europe for the express purpose of making a permanent record of the witnesses.  He collected over a hundred interviews totaling 120 hours of interviews on a wire recorder .  And this was just after it all had happened. This is an extremely important document of history. His work was never really famous at the time.  His book I did not interview the dead was not famous, but he accurately recorded what actually happened.  I recommend anyone interested in holocaust research to Google his name and listen to the work he did.

 

But back to Buchenwald.   If you remember, Elie and his father were evacuated in January of 1945.  The Americans marched into a pretty much SS-free camp on April 11.  When Patton’s army got a few miles outside of the camp, almost all of the 5000 plus SS soldiers ran for their lives.  Once they did that, the inmates themselves liberated the camp.   Elie records how he saw this from the inside.  It’s incredible how close Elie’s father came to surviving the war.  But again, As the Americans approached Buchenwald, the Nazis did at Buchenwald what they had done at Auschwitz when the Russians got close- they tried to evacuate the camp.  Except this time, Elie didn’t participate. 

And the reason that he didn’t is that he has no feeling of humanity left in him- as we see in the narrative.  The death of his father destroyed him.  His father had become delirious.  He had diarreha and couldn’t stop the dehydration.  His screaming couldn’t stop.  Where at Auschwitz, Wiesel tells us stories of human compassion, here at Buchenwald- we see none of that.  The Block Leader at their block here also gives Elie advice on how to survive at Buchenwald but listen to how opposite it is to the advice he had recived at Auschwitz….and listen to how Elie responds to the death of his father

 

Read page 110

 

Of course we feel nothing but sympathy for little Elie Wiesel.  The circumstances of his father’s death is beyond anything anyone I know could ever even sympathize with.  But what Wiesel highlights is that he found in his own heart darkness as well.  He felt apathy- and it seems this felt like evil.  His first emotion was not sadness but relief.  He was not sad at the death of his own father- he was in fact dehumanized,  later he came to feel guilty about that.  It seems to perhaps even frighten him.

 

I think it did frighten him, although he surely didn’t have words to voice it then in the camp.  But later in life, as Wiesel has had years to consider and reflect on all that he witnessed, he has this to say- “I have always thought that the opposite of culture is not ignorance, but indifference. That the opposite of morality is not immorality, but again indifference.”  I think that must have been what he felt- perhaps it was the feeling of indifference that felt like the evil and the darkness that he had seen all over the camps.  The Nazis were the absolutely expression of evil; the absolute expression of indifference.

 

Well, as we know, Elie Wiesel was to spend the rest of his life advocating for peace.  He never advocated for revenge- not even for the children of Nazis- as you would expect.  He advocated that the way to fight indifference was to care- to be kind- to express empathy- and this not as a matter of state policy- although it does involve that too- but as a matter of personal choice.

 

Another point to make, and he says this way later in his life- almost at the end.   He said he did not really believe we would achieve it really- he didn’t think we learned much from the 20th century.  David Axelrod interviewed him at the University of Chicago and he acknowledged this He admits, and to use his words, “the world learns nothing”.  However, in spite of all that- he still believed in humanity- he was a teacher who loved his students and believed in the future- he believed that we can combat indifference, we should and we must- knowing- like Solzehenzen that it will never be eradicted but it can be constrained. 

 

He famously said that “hope is the memory of the future.”  I really like that line. It’s a paradox, but  beautifully hopeful.  And I believe in that hope too- the legacy of of Elie Wiesel is the legacy of kindness, and compassion- lived out- not judging others or condemning them in the name of an -ism- but in fighting indifference through our actions.  And so in that spirit, it is fitting that we end our discussion of Night reading the speech Wiesel made the night he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize because  although he died in 2016, his words, do live on- as does his witness- as does his hope. Garry will you read it for us. 

 

 

 

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