into NIGHT
I just read Elie Wiesel's story "Night" about a 16 year old boy enslaved in SS-run Nazi concentration camps like Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Buma for a year. The 16 year old was him.
I remember films on T.V. of the allies liberating such camps in the spring of 1945, of Eisenhower and his staff walking through them seeing all the skeletons of people - alive and dead, all were virtual skeletons covered by thin layers of flesh.
Wiesel had a difficult time getting his book published after the war. A Frenchman, Francois Mauriac, finally helped him do it. Some 40 years later, Wiesel said, high school and college students were required to read it in school.
I never read it in school, and in fact rarely heard Wiesel's name until recently. I doubt any high schools make it required reading now. Not only is it irrelevant to youth today, they probably wouldn't have any understanding of it or interest in it. That's just my guess. I hope I'm wrong. I don't know this for a fact.
Wiesel relates his nightmare "living" in these camps, seeing the smoke from burnt bodies issuing from the huge chimney nearby over the crematoriums where his people were thrown, some alive at the time. The stench and smoke were always with him; the furnaces operated without ceasing.
Wiesel experienced his father dying in front of his eyes, 4 months before the camp was liberated. His father had been his reason for enduring all the suffering there. His mother and sisters were herded away from the 2 of them upon their initial arrival to camp, murdered how and when he didn't know. He never saw them again. How Elie survived, he never knew.
I think the thing that moved me the most was that Elie had been a fervent Jew before the camps. Soon after entering and experiencing the hell and horror there, he knew God not only didn't care, but couldn't or wouldn't do anything to save his people; in effect He was dead.
I don't know much about Wiesel's later life, whether he regained any semblance of belief in God. He married, I assume he did that to preserve himself and his sanity.
I recommend the book.