No longer silent

I’m back! Life has gone on so that I’ve nearly forgotten that I’ve had a blog. And nothing less than a powerful book could have brought me back. Not to say that I don’t like blogging, but rather that up until now the only things worth blogging about would have been chemistry related. It would have been all about precipitates, titrating hard water, and (irritating) molecular orbitals. So really, it’s for your own sakes I’ve not been back.

The book that has resucitated my blog is Night by Elie Wiesel. It’s an intense recounting of the author’s experience as a Jewish teenager in concentration camps in 1944-1945. What’s so impressive to me about this book is that so much is relayed in so few words. The New York Times calls it, “A slim volume of terrifying power.”  In the preface Wiesel struggles to talk about how words were not enough, not sufficient for expressing the horror that he saw and experienced. “And yet, having lived through this experience, one could not keep silent no matter how difficult, if not impossible, it was to speak.” Wiesel, through his experience, knew the danger of remaining silent yet he somehow sensed that saying too much would take away from his narrative. “...I worries that some things might be superfluous. Substance alone mattered. I was more afraid of having said too much than too little.”

The story itself is quick and too the point. The fourth page suddenly, and with no warning, begins with “And then, one day all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet.” There is no excess exploration of emotions, no explanations of circumstances. Bam. There it is. This theme of silence, of saying too little, of saying too much, runs through the entire book.  Together with the power of silence comes the inability to listen. Or rather to hear only what one wants to hear. Wiesel calls the book “Night,” which may be the only way to describe how dark a time it was. A time when words are not enough, when silence reigns, when evil deeds abound, when the darkness has seeped into one's very soul. 

There are a few other themes that come out: lies/deception vs, truth, the stripping of a person, hunger, camaraderie vs. every man for himself, the struggle to just survive and maintain sanity.  While reading it, many questions come to mind: When is it wise to remain silence? Where is the line between allowing self-defense mechanisms to take over and remembering one’s humanity? Would I have chosen survival over dignity? Is it better to live with regrets than to die with honor? How do you not go mad in such circumstances?

Wiesel waited ten years to write his book. He wrote it reluctantly, but knowing that it was important, nay, imperative that others should know his story. “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time...The witness has force himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.”