Transcript Elie Wiesel The Nobel Peace Prize 1986

Elie Wiesel
The Nobel Peace Prize 1986
• born in 1928
• Sighet, Hungary
• now Romania.
• Wiesel and his two older sisters survived.
• Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 by
advancing Allied troops
• Paris to work as a journalist.
• outspoken on Soviet Jewry, on Ethiopian
Jewry and on behalf of the State of Israel
today.
• New York City and is now a United States
citizen.
• Yale University, City College of New York,
Boston University.
• Elie Wiesel's statement, "...to remain silent
and indifferent is the greatest sin of all...“
• 36 works dealing with Judaism, the
Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of
all people to fight hatred, racism and
genocide.
• TIMELINE----• 1928--born in Sighet, Romania
• 1944 deported to Auschwitz
• Jan. 1945 father dies in Buchenwald
• Apr.1945 liberated from
concentration camp
• 1948 moved to Paris to study at the
Sorbonne
• 1948 work in journalism begins
• 1954 decides to write about the
Holocaust
• 1958 Night is published
• 1963 receives U.S. citizenship
• 1964 returned to Sighet
• 1965 first trip to Russia
• 1966 publishes Jews of Silence
• 1969 married Marion Rose
• 1972 son is born
• 1978 appointed chair of Presidential
Commission on the Holocaust
• 1980 Commission renamed U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council
• 1985 awarded Congressional Gold
Medal of Achievement
• 1986 awarded Nobel Peace Prize
• 1995--publishes memoirs
Section One
Summary
• In 1941, Eliezer, the narrator, is a twelve-year-
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old boy living in the Transylvanian town of
Sighet (then recently annexed to Hungary, now
part of Romania).
Orthodox Jewish family
Shopkeepers, highly respected within Sighet’s
Jewish community.
Eliezer has two older sisters, Hilda and Béa, and
a younger sister named Tzipora.
• Eliezer studies the Talmud, the Jewish oral
law.
• Cabbala (often spelled Kabbalah) Jewish
mystical texts
• Moshe the Beadle, a local pauper.
• Moshe is deported and returns.
• The town takes him for a lunatic and
refuses to believe his story.
• In the spring of 1944, the Hungarian
government falls into the hands of the
Fascists.
• anti-Semitism beyond Budapest
• the community leaders are arrested,
Jewish valuables are confiscated, and all
Jews are forced to wear yellow stars.
• small ghettos
• a gentile named Martha offers to hide
them in her village.
• Tragically, they decline the offer. A few
days later, herded onto cattle cars bound
for Auschwitz.
Analysis
• Why did the Jews stay?
• inability to acknowledge the cruelty of humans
• Focus on relationship with father
– father is a burden to him
– and his guilt
• preserve the memory of the Jewish
tradition through his father.
• laments the loss of this tradition
• later struggle with his faith.
• “Oh God, Lord of the Universe, take pity
upon us….”
• loss of faith
• cannot believe God who would allow such
suffering.
• the most horrible of the Nazis’ deeds
• metaphorical murder of God.
• theodicy—how God can exist and permit
such evil.
• Night chronicles Eliezer’s loss of
innocence,
• his confrontation with evil,
• and his questioning of God’s existence.
Section Two
Summary
• Cattle cars,
• unbearable conditions.
• no air, the heat, no room to sit,
• and everyone is hungry and
thirsty.
• loss their sense of public decorum.
–Like MORP dancing
• Flirting and ignoring
• Hand over valuables or get shot.
• The doors to the car are nailed shut,
further preventing escape.
• Madame Schächter,
–soon cracks under the oppressive
treatment
–begins to scream
–sees a fire in the darkness outside
the car.
• she is tied up and gagged
• reached Auschwitz station.
• name means nothing
• bribe locals to get news.
• labor camp where they will be treated well
• and kept together as families.
• a relief,
• False hope kills
• Madame Schächter again
• she is beaten into silence.
• everybody sees the chimneys of vast
furnaces.
• a terrible,
• but undefined, odor in the air
• burning human flesh.
• Birkenau, the processing center for
arrivals at Auschwitz.
Analysis
• inhuman cruelty can deprive sense of
morality
• and humanity.
• treating the Jews as less than human =
• Inhuman act s
• —cruelty breeds cruelty,
• treated like animals,
• begin to act like animals.
• The first hint –
• loss of modesty
• and sense of sexual inhibition.
• beat Madame Schächter
• others vocally support
• continual denial . . .
• merely a work camp.
• almost too awful a story to convey
• sanity and insanity
• The crazy, sees clearly into the
future,
• other Jews, the sane, fail to foresee
their fate.
• sanity and insanity become confused
in the face of atrocity.
• the extermination of six million Jews
efficiently and methodically.
• The world would never sit back and let
this happen . . .
• fiction and memoir.
• breaks conventions of fiction writing
–For example, separated from his
mother and sister, Eliezer’s mother
and sister are never mentioned
again in Night.
• first-person narration
• powerful immediacy of emotion.
• limited perspective
• and lack of knowledge
• all the more terrifying.
• the beginnings of doubt: “Why should I
bless His name?” Eliezer asks, “What had I
to thank Him for?”
• Akiba Drumer, whose faith in divine
redemption raises the prisoners’ spirits.
• the beginning of his loss of faith in man.
• The guard beats his father
• guiltily silent.
• silence in the face of evil allows evil to
survive.
• the most famous, and the most
moving, paragraphs in all of
Night.
• Eliezer looks back on his first
night in Birkenau and describes
not only what he felt at the time
but also the lasting impact of that
night:
• Never shall I forget that night . . . which
has turned my life into one long night . . .
.
Never shall I forget those flames which
consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence
which deprived me, for all eternity, of the
desire to live. Never shall I forget those
moments which murdered my God. . . .
Never shall I forget these things, even if I
am condemned to live as long as God
Himself. Never.
• repetition of “Never shall I forget”
• forever burned into his mind.
• personal mantra for Wiesel
• the child’s murder
• symbolically enacts the murder of
God.
• God must not exist in a world where
an innocent child can be hanged on
the gallows.
• “Where is He?”
• Eliezer asks rhetorically, and then
answers,
• “He is hanging here on this gallows.”
• the death of Eliezer’s own
innocence.
• He has lost his faith
• Beginning to lose his sense of
morals and values as well.
• Eliezer’s dominant goal.
• only to feed himself.
• angry at his father for failing to
learn
• sheer luck.
• disrespectful of the memories of those
millions who did not survive.
Final Summary
• High Holidays are the time of divine judgment.
• Rosh Hashanah like sheep before the shepherd
• the SS (Nazi police) performs a selection on the
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prisoners at Buna.
Dr. Mengele, the notoriously cruel Nazi doctor
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengele
• God’s role
• the Holocaust tests father-son bonds
• the Binding of Isaac, known in Hebrew as the
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Akedah
Night reverses the Akedah story—the father is
sacrificed so that his son might live.
God fails to appear to save the sacrificial victim
at the last moment.
God is powerless, or silent.
• must record the events of the Holocaust,
honor his father’s memory, and repay his
sacrifice.
• not limited to the Holocaust—humanity
has an unimaginably wicked streak in it.
• “I’ve got more faith in Hitler than in
anyone else. He’s the only one who’s kept
his promises . . . to the Jewish people.”
• Akiba Drumer’s death
• humankind requires faith and hope to live.
• the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead
• betrayal not just of God but also of his
fellow human beings.
• All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel speaks at far
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greater length about his religious feelings after
the Holocaust.
“My anger rises up within faith and not outside
it,” he writes. “I had seen too much suffering to
break with the past and reject the heritage of
those who had suffered.”
His narrator, Eliezer, unable to reject the Jewish
tradition and the Jewish God completely, even
though he declares his loss of faith
• ends with Eliezer a shattered young man,
faithless and without hope for himself or
for humanity
• The mere fact of writing Night seems to
conflict with Eliezer’s hopelessness.
• Buchenwald has fatally weakened Eliezer’s
father.
• he sits in the snow and refuses to move.
• Eliezer’s father is afflicted with dysentery,
• extremely dangerous to give water to a
man with dysentery.
• The prisoners steal his food and beat him.
• Eliezer’s father again cries for water, the SS
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officer screams at Eliezer’s father to shut up,
beats him in the head
The next morning, January 29, 1945, Eliezer
wakes up to find that his father has been taken
to the crematory.
To his deep shame, he does not cry. Instead, he
feels relief.
Final Timeline
• On April 5, with the American army approaching, the
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Nazis decide to annihilate all the Jews left in the camp.
On April 10, with about 20,000 people remaining in the
camp, the Nazis decide to evacuate—and kill—everyone
left in the camp.
on April 11, the American army arrives at Buchenwald.
Eliezer is struck with food poisoning and spends weeks
in the hospital, deathly ill.
When he finally raises himself and looks in the mirror—
he has not seen himself in a mirror since leaving
Sighet—he is shocked: “From the depths of the mirror,”
Wiesel writes, “a corpse gazed back at me.”
Night Study Guide Notes
• There are five motifs to look for while
reading Night:
– Night – pay attention to what happens at
night and what that might symbolize.
Remember what we learned when we talked
about archetypes and what night might
symbolize.
– Bearing Witness – Pay attention to which
characters are witnesses and to what they
bear witness.
Night Study Guide Notes
• Motifs (continued):
– Father-son Relationships – Pay attention to
how Elie and his father’s relationship
develops; in addition, notice other father-son
relationships in the book.
– Loss of faith – Notice how Elie’s faith in God
changes as the book progresses. Write on
your study guides where these changes occur.
Night Study Guide Notes
• Motifs (continued):
– Voice vs. Silence – Who has a voice and who
chooses to remain silent? Why might Elie
Wiesel title his novel what he did originally,
and why did he no longer remain silent?
Interesting Fact
• In Poland, 90% of the approximately
3,000,000 Jews were murdered in the
Holocaust.
Nationalsozialismus
Swastika
It is composed of su- meaning
"good, well" and asti "to be"
suasti thus means "wellbeing."
The Third Reich
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer
Schutzstaffel
Geheime Staatspolizei, "Secret
State Police
Kristallnacht
Night of the Long Knives
Antisemitism
Adolf Hitler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler
Erwin Rommel
Joseph Goebells
• Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi
Germany from 1933 to 1945.
• one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates
• zealous orator
• and anti-Semitic.
• Major influences
• Friedrich Nietzsche,
• Oswald Spengler and,
• most importantly,
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
• one of the founders of "scientific" antiSemitism,
• The Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century
• The Goebbels family in 1942: (back row)
Hildegard, Harald Quandt, Helga; (front
row) Helmut, Hedwig, Magda, Heidrun,
Joseph and Holdine
• At 8 pm on the evening of 1 May,
Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist,
Helmut Kunz, to kill his six children by
injecting them with morphine and then,
when they were unconscious, crushing an
ampule of cyanide in each of their
mouths.[100]
• "At about 8:15 pm, Goebbels arose from
the table, put on his hat, coat and gloves
and, taking his wife's arm, went upstairs
to the garden." Shortly after Goebbels and
his wife committed suicide . . . Their
bodies were immediately burned . . .
• On May 3, 1945, the day after Soviet
troops led by Lt. Col. Ivan Klimenko had
discovered the burned bodies of their
parents in the courtyard above, they
found the bodies of the six children in
their beds, dressed in their nightgowns,
the girls wearing bows in their hair.[29]
• "What he seemed to fear more than
anything else was a death devoid of
dramatic effects. To the end he was what
he had always been: the propagandist for
himself. Whatever he thought or did was
always based on this one agonizing wish
for self-exaltation, and this same object
was served by the murder of his children
...
• They were the last victims of an egomania
extending beyond the grave. However,
this deed, too, failed to make him the
figure of tragic destiny he had hoped to
become; it merely gave his end a touch of
repulsive irony."[107]