The book Night by Elie Wiesel has been on my to-read list for a very long time. Elie Wiesel tells of a desperate struggle for survival and how far people will go to keep on living for another day. Elie Wiesel writes from his own experience as a 15 year old boy who survives the brutality of a Nazi concentration camp. What makes this story so powerful is that Elie does not just talk about what happened, but tells you how it felt to be there with such raw intensity that you stand appalled in the midst of the story.
A theme throughout the book is relationships between fathers
and sons. Elie enters the concentration camp with a grim determination to stay
near his father on whom he feels his life depends. Near the end of the book he struggles with a
sense of wanting to distance himself from his father who has become a detriment
to his own survival. In spite of these feelings he continues to fight for his father's life. One very stark
story that Elie shares which is particularly gut wrenching
is of an old man clutching a crust of bread to his chest. The man’s son comes
and violently rips it away. The old man
says, “Don’t you remember me. I am your father.” Others come and violently take the bread away
from the son. Both father and son end up dead.
A very haunting part of the story for me as a person of
faith is the death of God. When an
angelic looking boy is hanged someone asks, “Where is God?” Elie responds by saying, “Where is he? Here
he is – he is hanging on the gallows.
What I think Elie means is that his faith in a God of love dies on the gallows with that boy. This question resonates for me as
a Christian. We all ask ourselves where God is in the face of suffering. I too
would say that God was hanging on the gallows, but when I say that I would mean
that God suffers with everyone who is a victim of the world’s brokenness. I am reminded of a prayer, “Crucified savior,
naked God, you hang disgraced and powerless.
Grieving, we dare to hope, as we wait at the cross with your mother and
your friend.”
There is an important question that arises when we read
a book like this. The question being what
we would do to survive. The history of
the world suggests most of us would let go of our humanity in a bid for
survival. The studies done by Milgram on
obedience suggest that there may not be as much
separating us from the Nazi prison guards as we like to think. We need to ponder this question. There are some things worse than death. Becoming a person you detest is one of those things.
