IN SEARCH OF A VOICE

IN SUCH A SILENCE

WENDY YU: 00165108

QUEST FOR PEACE IN LITERATURE AND FILM: PACS 312

The name of the book is also its central metaphor. Night is the living death of the concentration camp, is Holocaust, is genocide. Night is the persistent memory of hell. Yet, this book is far more than a tale of the never-ending night. Elie Wiesel lingers over the silence of his people and this book is his attempt to break through that silence. Challenged by the sight of the children incinerating in the pit, he also questions the silence of God. Confronted by his words, we question the silence of other human beings in that atrocious world.

In the Preface for the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, Robert McAfee Brown spoke of the author’s ten-year vow of silence, as well as the silence of publishers and cultured people ten years after the fact. Fifty years after World War II, Japan's former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama offered a personal apology to victims, because only 26% of his colleagues in the Japanese government supported an official apology and 47% were against it. Any given moment, there is a war tearing apart an economically insignificant country and newspapers dedicate five lines to them under the heading other news. We still live in that atrocious world and we are all guilty of that silence.

To be silent is to deny that there exists a problem. Because the Jews of Sighet chose the illusion of calmness, they played an inadvertent role in their own destruction. They believed that the foreign Jews “had arrived in Galicia, were working there, and were even satisfied with their lot.” (p. 4) They believed that the Germans would stay in Budapest for strategic and political reasons. They formed reassuring first impressions of the soldiers. They even thought themselves rather well off when forced into ghettos. “It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto—it was illusion.” (p. 10)

Movies about the Holocaust, such as La Vita è Bella and Jakob the Liar, establish the importance of optimism as a survival strategy. However, the kind of foolish optimism demonstrated by the Jews of Sighet is founded upon the belief that they can afford to ignore other people’s problems. The fate of the foreign Jews and the Jews in Budapest only distracted them for a second from their daily routines. Similarly, until the drama of September 11, 2001, some regarded the Middle East peace talks as abstract exercises in diplomacy. Now, we regularly rehearse evacuations from tall buildings. But when will we face the real problem, not homeland security, but peace in the Middle East?

On two occasions, the quiet tone of the novel was disrupted. “A piercing cry split the silence: ‘Fire! I can see a fire! I can see a fire!’” (p. 22) Madame Schächter cried as they approached the hell that is Auschwitz. The others called her mad, as they did Moshe the Beadle. They tied her up, put a gag in her mouth, and even struck her, so that they could continue to sleep and to dream. A few sturdy young fellows wanted the world to hear about Auschwitz while there is still escape, but they were told to be patient “even when the sword hangs over your head”. (p. 29) Two steps away from the pit, they remembered Madame Schächter.

On the other occasion, silence gave way to music. “What madman could be playing the violin here, at the brink of his own grave? Or was it really a hallucination? It must have been Juliek. He played a fragment from Beethoven’s concerto. I had never heard sounds so pure. In such a silence.” (p. 90) This occurred much later in the book, after father and son decided that they did not have enough faith in the Russians to wait, when Hitler was “the only one who’s kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” (p. 77)

Eliezer thought that Juliek had gone out of his mind, bringing his useless violin to Gleiwitz. But the violin was a voice. A concerto is written for solo instrument and orchestra, but Juliek played without orchestra to “an audience of dying and dead men”. (p. 90) The violin was the only voice. Although Beethoven’s music is famous for its tragic intensity, inner struggle and suffering, his one and only violin concerto is famous for its peaceful form and pure harmony. Amidst men who had been tortured into automatons, who only wanted to eat and avoid being beaten, who regressed into an emotionally void state, the violin was the one voice of consolation.

From Moshe the Beadle to Madame Schächter to Juliek, it seems that only the so-called crazy people had voices. The sane ones, seeing the smoke and blaze of their own grave, remained silent, as if waiting to wake up from a nightmare. The rest of the world, seeing the violation of humanity, remained silent. “Humanity is not concerned with us.” (p. 30) When the book was published, people refused to read it because of the depressing subject matter. Today, people prefer reality TV to the reality of Liberia, of Chechnya, of Somalia, of Syria and all those other unfamiliar places. Why concern ourselves with knowing the problems of the world, when we do not know the solutions?

Because “every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.” (p.2) To ask a question is to believe that there is an answer. To remain silent is to surrender to the problems of the world. If we do not question conflicts, they will never end. If we do not question peace, it will never come. This book is not simply a record of history or a study of human suffering. It commands us to find our voices and, in those voices, the strength to ask the right questions. Its relevance will shine through the darkness of the night and beyond the light of dawn. (977 words including quotes)