Elie Wiesel: the search for God in a concentration camp
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel survived the hell of Hitler's concentration camps as a teenager. He outlined this hell in simple language in his book “Night”, which after 1958 was translated into dozens of languages around the world.
Wiesel writes about the stages of genocide and attempts to survive in this hell, filling the story with human details and psychological details. Here a man comes to his community of peacefully living Transylvanian Jews, who miraculously escaped from a train taken away for extermination. He asks only to listen to his evidence of mass murder, but those around him categorically do not want to relate what they heard to their own possible fate. “People refused not only to believe his stories, but even just to listen to them. “He is trying to pity us with stories about his fate. Well, imagination..." - they said around.
Even when the Germans enter their city and order the Jews to wear yellow stars, Shlomo, the father of Eli (Eliezer), says to his son: “Yellow star? So what? No one has died from this yet...”
We read “Night” and recognize ourselves: after all, we are all the same people who, even under the most terrible circumstances, continue to hope for the best. Our brain in the same way does not allow in and blocks shocking information, not even wanting to consider the worst case scenario.
But when father and son, deported by train to Auschwitz, walk along a barbed wire passage along a flaming moat of human bodies, a dialogue unfolds between son and father in which all faith in human Civilization dies. “My forehead was covered with cold sweat, but I told him that I don’t believe that people are burned in our time - humanity would never allow this...” The father replies: “Humanity? Humanity is not interested in us. Today everything is allowed. Everything is possible, even the ovens of crematoriums...” His voice broke off.”
Teenager Eli, who grew up in a religious Jewish family, experiences a terrible breakdown of all his ideas and faith in the Creator. He writes about the first night after the selection in Auschwitz: “I will never forget these faces of the children, whose bodies before my eyes turned into rings of smoke against the background of the silent sky. I will never forget this flame that forever incinerated my faith. I will never forget these moments that killed my God and my soul; these dreams that have become a hot desert.”
Throughout the entire autobiographical book “Night” there is an argument between Elie Wiesel and God - an argument that sometimes turns into a scream, sometimes sounding like the whisper of a lost soul. A teenager who grew up quickly in Nazi hell is looking for God and gives us the words of other prisoners who asked the same question: where is the Almighty in this man-made hell?
Eli describes how their barracks were built for the public hanging of another teenager - almost a child, as he writes, with the face of a sad angel. “I heard the same man behind me ask: “Where is God?” “And a voice inside me answered: “Where is He?” Yes, here He is - He was hanged on this gallows ... "
Spiritual suffering is described by Wiesel on a par with physical suffering. In September 1944, half-dead prisoners found the strength to somehow celebrate the onset of Rosh Hashanah (Judgment Day, or Jewish New Year) with prayers. “Ten thousand prisoners gathered for the solemn service - block elders, capos, ministers of death. “Bless the Eternal...” The rabbi’s voice was barely audible. At first I thought it was the wind. - Blessed be the Name of the Eternal! Thousands of voices repeated the blessing, bowing like trees in a storm.”
Eli himself, full of indignation, gnaws a cracker on the day of the Day of Judgment fast - believing that this is expressing his personal protest against the Creator, who allows all this.
Elie Wiesel, however, believes that religious faith gave many the strength to survive. By this, he confirms the main concept of the Austrian psychiatrist of Jewish origin Viktor Frankl, who also survived Hitler’s concentration camps and wrote the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” after the war. Frankl proved that having a meaning and purpose in life helped many prisoners overcome inhumane conditions. And those who lost the meaning of life quickly faded away. “Poor Akiva Drumer!” Wiesel writes in his book. “If he could still believe in God and see in these torments tests sent by God, he would have successfully passed the selection. But from the moment his faith showed the first crack, the struggle for life lost its meaning for him and dying began.”
The description of the torment and daily struggle for life ends in the book “Night” with these words: “About five in the evening the first American tank appeared at the gates of Buchenwald.”
After the war, Wiesel returned to the faith of his ancestors.
Elie Wiesel left this material world on Saturday 2 July 2016. Probably, now Eli gets in Heaven all the answers to the questions asked by him and not asked in the concentration camp ..
Books by Elie Wiesel can be purchased on Amazon.com:
1. Night
2.The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day
3. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs
5. The Trial of God: (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)
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