Elie Wiesel’s gloomy account of his experience in the Holocaust is one of widespread silence; leading to the loss of humanity within his community as well as himself. As a reoccurring theme throughout the text, we can see that silence plays a large part in the novel; Night, showing itself in situations like the silencing of Mrs. Schachter in the cattle cars and the final sentences of when the main character; Eliezer, sees himself in the mirror after being freed. Taking place during the second World War, the Holocaust was; as defined by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as “the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”
Silence isn’t just an exacerbated behavior that oppressors force upon their victims, but also a deadly disease of the oppressed. When taken from their homes, Eliezer, along with several others were jam-packed into a cattle car that was going away from Sighet; a Jewish ghetto that they called home, and began their journey to Auschwitz; an extermination camp that in turn would strip them of everything that they once loved. When faced with the reality that their lives were going to change dramatically for the worse; even subsequently after their share of fair cautioning from Moshe the Beadle; an escapee victim of the Nazi firing squad, Mrs. Schachter began to hallucinate and scream about a terrible fire in the horizon. While in the same position as everyone else, she was in a petrifyied state of mind.
Everyone in her family had been separated from her, but she was able to keep a hold on to her ten-year-old son. Being as exhausted as they were from days of going without food or water and suffering the emotional toll of not knowing what was to become of them; her screams angered them to a great extent, and ‘A few young men forced her to sit down, then bound and gagged her. Silence fell again’ (Wiesel 26). Unfortunately for her as well as the rest of those in the cattle car, she was able to get free from her restraints and was brutally beaten by several of the men to silence her once again as she had started back on to her shrieks of some all-consuming fire. The sad part is that no one tried to even stop the men from beating on this already broken woman, and some even cheered them on as they too were weary of her screams. As the evils of their oppressors began to consume them, their actions of silencing Mrs. Schachter emulated those of their captors, adding to the inhumanity that plagued their society. While it unified them, it did not help their situation one bit as it kept them contained. This act was not only them throwing away their humanity but playing into the narrative of their assailants.
As the text begins to wind down to the end, it is almost like there is a chilling silence, pleasantly sweet yet tragic and sorrowful. Eliezer had just been saved from the extermination camp of Buchenwald by the Allies and ironically enough he was almost taken out by food poisoning as the newly freed Jews stuffed themselves full as their first act of freedom. After taking what seemed like forever to recover; even though it was only a couple of weeks, the main character looks in the mirror and “from the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (Wiesel 115). From those final sentences, we can see the final example to the theme of silence that this novel depicts throughout the text. With this final passage from the text of Night, we can see how Eliezer’s sees himself and how much the toll of the Holocaust has had on his body. While he may have survived the Holocaust; might I add at one of the worst camps to be in, he himself in his physical state is weak and broken, but essentially, he perceives a dead body.
A corpse, silent and laying dormant to the events of the outside world. The boy he once knew himself to be no longer existed and that the inner child in him had died as his spirit was stripped away from him by the events that he had witnessed and endured quietly. His silence to events like the brutal beating of Mrs. Schachter, the numerous thrashings his father endured that eventually lead to his death, the separation and irrevocably the decimation of his entire family, being surrounded by constant fear, deaf-ears to the excruciating cries of those who were in anguish, and death; these proceedings broke him. No one, especially a child should have to endure that.
In conclusion while silence played a huge part in the slaughter of the Jewish people, it was a necessary tool for self-preservation as they grew to understand talking out of turn or bringing attention to one’s self ultimately would lead them to great harm and possibly death. With examples like the men silencing Mrs. Schachter and the thoughts of Eliezer at the end of the text we can come to understand that the authorities and oppressions that take over someone’s life can train them to become silent or carry the same traits as their accosters. This text does not display anything different from how we view silence today, as many countries, states, and communities; including our own, condemn and write-off the struggles and maltreatments of others of who they do not perceive as equals. While very similar in aspect to the thoughts of those who took part in administering the Holocaust, this is a very frightening attribute to possess as we haven’t gotten that fair in the scale of things in the United States since the massacre of countless Native Americans, the slavery of the indigenous African populations for almost 400 years, and the internment of the Japanese-American population during the same time that this book would have taken place. All in all, silence is the dissolution of humanity and it dooms history to repeat itself.
