8A Night Blog 2018

The Holocaust. It is a just a word, but the story behind those three syllables is far greater and has irrevocably changed human history. Before studying this topic, the extent of my knowledge on the Holocaust amounted to “When Hitler and the Nazis tried to kill all the Jews during World War Two”, which is in some ways accurate, in others, entirely wrong. I have learned that the Holocaust was so much more than Hitler and the Nazis, more than Germany, more than the war. It was the systematic destruction of innocent people by other people. A civilian genocide enacted and carried out by civilians. Jewish men, women, and children were ostracized, targeted, captured, and eventually, mass murdered by their own countrymen. And what’s worse, the world turned a blind eye. But no longer. Throughout my studies of the Holocaust and its effects, my eyes have been opened to the horrors that Jews, Romas, people of color, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and more faced during the 12 long ye...

My friends of yesterday pass me by, Toward the gate of the ghetto, Silently weeping. My heart trembles; The look in their eyes Frightens me. Together, We walk toward the station Under a summer sun. I begin to wonder: Could this be just a nightmare? How is it possible? Standing on the station platform Under a blazing sun, We climb into The convoy of cattle cars, Waiting Like an open tomb. Eighty persons in each one, Eighty persons Abandoned by the whole world. We pretend That we are not, For what if one of us still did believe. A prolonged whistle pierces the air. The wheels begin to grind. Something inside me feels the need to cry. For unfulfilled hopes, extinguished futures. Dreams, Burned to a cinder, turned into ashes, Devoured by a black flame. I look back. The ghetto Disappears over the horizon. Ahead of us, Da...

Throughout Night , the Nazis take away everyone and everything the Jews care about. And for Elie Wiesel, they also took away his faith. In the ghetto, before the camps, Elie was devoutly Jewish. He even tried to convince his father to allow him to master Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism that one usually attempts as an adult: I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. One day I asked my father to find me a master who could guide me in my studies of Kabbalah. "You are too young for that. Maimonides tells us that one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism, a world fraught with peril. First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend. (Wiesel 3-4) In these years before the concentration camps, I think that Elie’s life revolved around his religion. He might have even become a rabbi if his faith hadn’t been destroyed by the Nazis...

Portrait of Leiba Gruber in 1939, 4 years before she and her mother were killed by the Nazis in the Bronica forest in autumn, 1943. Leiba and her family were Ukranian Jews sent to Galizien, an oil refinery camp. Her father, Bumek Gruber, was an "essential worker" at the camp and therefore Leiba and her mother were part of a group of "protected families". However, in 1943, the Nazis took all of the protected families into Bronica Forest and executed them. Only Bumek Gruber survived until the end of the war. collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1173760 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C.

My experience reading Night so far has been one of horror. I have read other books about the Holocaust, but none have taken me so far into the reality of the hellish concentration camp barracks as Elie Wiesel’s memoir. In reading his story, I am so far filled with not only remorse and anger, but with shock. Elie Wiesel was barely older than me when he suffered so much. He and his family were torn apart, and he experienced such misery and pain, physically and emotionally, during his time at the camps, that I cannot imagine how he felt. Most poignant for me is the effect that misery and terror had upon them: I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded – and devoured – by a black flame. (Wiesel 37) These times that Elie Wiesel reflects on the change that happened to him within days of entering the concentration camps are the hardest to bear f...