Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #4
In 1962, Elie Wiesel published the final part of his Night trilogy, the novel DAY. The book first appeared in French as Le jour and in English as The Accident. Like Dawn, Day addresses the struggle of the Holocaust survivor to dwell in the world of the living while feeling a ceaseless pull toward the world of the dead.
The novel opens on the streets of New York City where the reader is let into the mind of the protagonist, a young journalist who has survived the death camps but suffers deeply from his experiences. As he walks to the theater with his girlfriend, Kathleen, he is struck by a passing taxi and badly injured. While in the hospital, feverish and in agony, the young man is tormented by thoughts of the damage that his post-Holocaust trauma has caused to both himself and those close to him. When he realizes that his stepping in front of the taxi might not have been an innocent accident, but instead a deliberate flirtation with death, he is forced to face the question of whether he can choose to forge a relationship with life despite the weight of his suffering.
While a fictionalized account, Day draws from Wiesel’s experience of being in a bad automobile accident in 1956 in which he suffered 48 fractured bones and was wheelchair bound for a year. It also reflects, as do Night and Dawn, his struggle with a God whom he raged against yet could not reject.
Passage #1:
“You love me, but you don’t look at me?” she asked gloomily. “Thanks for the compliment.”
“You don’t understand,” I went right on. “One doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. You can love God, but you can’t look at Him.”
She seemed satisfied with this comparison. I would have to practice lying.
“Whom do you look at when you love God?” she asked after a moment of silence.
“Yourself. If man could contemplate the face of God, he would stop loving him. God needs love; he does not need understanding.” (235)
Passage #2:
After the war, when I arrived in Paris, I had often, very often, been urged to tell. I refused. I told myself that the dead didn’t need to be heard. They are less bashful than I. Shame has no hold on them, while I was bashful and ashamed. That’s the way it is: shame tortures not the executioners but their victims. The greatest shame is to have been chosen by destiny. Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, His favorite toys. (264)
Passage #3:
“Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul—and worse, the souls of your friends—for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep. Saints are those who die before the end of the story. The others, those who live out their destiny, no longer dare look at themselves in the mirror, afraid they may see their inner image: a monster laughing at unhappy women and at saints who are dead…”
Kathleen listened, in a daze, her eyes wide open. As I spoke, her back bent over even more. Her pale lips whispered the same sentence tirelessly: “Go on! I want to know more. Go on!”
Then I fell on my knees, took her head in my hands, and, looking straight into her eyes, I told her the story of my grandmother, then the story of my little sister, and of my father, and of my mother; in very simple words, I described to her how man can become a grave for the unburied dead. (271)
Passage #4:
“Do you believe in God, Doctor?” My question took him by surprise. He stopped suddenly, wrinkling his forehead. “Yes,” he answered. “But not in the operating room. There I only count on myself.” His eyes looked deeper. He added, “On myself and on the patient. Or, if you prefer, on the life in the diseased flesh. Life wants to live. Life wants to go on. It is opposed to death. It fights. The patient is my ally. He fights on my side. Together we are stronger than the enemy. Take the boy last night. He didn’t accept death. He helped me to win the battle. He was holding on, clinging. He was asleep, anesthetized, and yet he was taking part in the fight…” (289)
Passage #5:
“Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead,” he said looking right through me. “It is man’s duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.” (337)
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