The further you get from the past, the easier it is to forget.
But, surely, you’re thinking this cannot apply to all historical events. Some must be too painful and too raw to forget. Some are so indelible their lessons last forever.
Many people are inclined to believe the Holocaust is immune to loss in this way, immune to being buffed away by years. Students read books about it in school from a young age, like Lois Lowry’s classic “Number the Stars” and it’s captured on screen in famous films like “Schindler’s List” and “Life is Beautiful.” And if you’re a historical fiction reader, there’s a smash hit novel set during the time period nearly every other year.
Yet, as it seems so close, these fictionalized tales likely push us further from the truth in certain ways. Recently, I went to pick up Elie Wiesel’s famous “Night” trilogy made up of a first-hand account of his time in Auschwitz and two fictional novellas about all that came after. I was immediately struck by how reading a first-hand account made all of the Hollywood versions of the story feel so empty in comparison.
There are no kindly Germans to hide a Jew in their basement, like in “The Book Thief” or a whirlwind romance like in “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” here. “Night” is the sparse and hard-hitting story of how Wiesel was living in Hungary during World War II, the impending dread, coupled with denial as the Nazis drew closer to his Jewish community. The story follows his family’s banishment to a ghetto and then their trek to Auschwitz in a train car where they find burning bodies, hard labor and a seemingly endless run through an entire night fleeing Russian troops.
Unlike a more stylized story, there aren’t tense moments where a Nazi hovers just around the corner and barely misses the protagonist as they sneak around the camp in the middle of the night. Instead, the suspense and terror come from the raw situation itself, and its pure randomness. Is it better to look at the SS officer while being potentially selected for murder? Or run past without a glance? Is it good to get sent right or left? There was no way to tell what choice or behavior could have saved him because it was all a sea of random, ruthless cruelty.
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This is all heart-wrenching and more horror than we can hardly process in a book scarcely longer than 100 pages, but what really broke through to me was his fictional follow-ups. In “Dawn” and “Day” Wiesel tells stories of survivors and where they went in life, one a young man who became an Israeli freedom fighter and the other a New York City journalist. Both are still haunted by the death they saw in the camps and are struggling with finding meaning in the world now that their terror is over as they both contend with death in a new way.
“Dawn” recounts the hours he waits before he has to execute a British soldier as retribution for the death of one of his fellow Israelis. And as the appointed time draws near he wonders at what point is killing in the name of justice still a good idea, or just more death? How do you reconcile with the trauma of your past? And after seeing the worst horrors imaginable, what’s the point of any of it, really?
And in “Day,” Wiesel confronts the part of trauma nobody wants to talk about: A horror so great that you wish you hadn’t survived it. In the novella, his Holocaust survivor protagonist is hit by a taxi and spends most of the book recovering from the near-fatal accident. This book artfully shows the gulf between the suicidal person disappointed they didn’t die and the contrast of all the joy around them that they didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this tension displayed in fiction before, or at least not to this great effect.
In this series, Wiesel shows us the depth of horror without any guardrails or fairytale endings. And he takes it a step further by getting away from the myth that everyone who lived through the death camps went on to live completely unaffected by it, even as the world continued to spin toward violence in the decades after. It’s a chilling look at an event so often we think of as ending when the United States Army rolled into the gates of Auschwitz to liberate the prisoners. The half-life of trauma is forever.
Here’s my advice: Read Wiesel’s account and then you can consider yourself good on Holocaust stories for the rest of your life. There’s nothing more searing than this.
Margaret Carmel is a former reporter with the Idaho Press and an avid book lover. You can send her your book suggestions at mlc.carmel1@gmail.com.
