1138 Wiesel, Elie
himself in the mirror, he sees a corpse staring back.
As a result, he, like Moshe, questions both the rea-
son for and completeness of his survival.
Russell Nurick
Innocence and experIence in Night
In the first chapter of his memoir, Elie Wiesel
recalls his former relationship with Moshe the
Beadle in order to identify and underscore several
aspects of both his and his community’s pre-
Holocaust innocence. Wiesel uses Moshe to teach
him what his father will not—cabbala. His preco-
cious interest in Jewish mysticism helps reveal his
absolute, though untested, faith in God and religion
as a young man. Yet his father explains that at age
12, Elie is too young to “venture into the perilous
world of mysticism,” especially since Maimonides
himself said one must be at least 30 before he or she
is ready for the task. His father’s discouragement
has the opposite effect of its intention: It results
in fairly typical adolescent rebellion, inadvertently
provoking Elie to take Moshe on as his mentor.
The text suggests that his violation of the “thou
shall obey thy mother and father” commandment is
probably one of the deepest encounters Wiesel has
with sin or immorality up till this point. However,
his response is not one of irreverence; rather, it
signifies his wish to reach adulthood at an acceler-
ated rate. Conversely, his father’s response indicates
that he wants to protect his son from the perils to
which adulthood will expose him until he is better
prepared to confront them.
Moshe’s presence also functions to depict how
none of the members of Wiesel’s community, ironi-
cally even those who have reached the status of
adult, are prepared for the evil with which they will
be confronted. One day, all of Sighet’s foreign Jews,
including Moshe, are expelled from the city. Once
they reach Polish territory, the Gestapo launches the
Jewish babies in the air and uses them as targets for
their machine guns. The Jewish adults are forced to
dig their own graves and then slaughtered in them.
Miraculously, Moshe escapes with only a wound, as
the Gestapo mistake him for dead. Demoralized by
what he witnesses, he returns to Sighet and encour-
ages its Jewish citizens to flee. However, no one
believes his account of the tragedy. They think he is
merely mad, and their naïveté eventually results in
the victimization that he tries to help them avoid.
Whereas the story begins by chronicling the
innocence of child and community, its dominant
movement is away from that innocence. Through
experiences of deportation, confinement, and vio-
lence, among others, they learn that the Gestapo’s
inhumanity has no bounds. In one of Night’s
many unsettling scenes, during her deportation
on a cattle-car train to Birkenau, a woman named
Madame Schächter yells, “Look! Look at it! Fire! A
terrible fire! Mercy! Oh, that f ire!” As do the other
passengers in the train car, Wiesel attributes her
behavior to the shock of being separated from her
family. Several passengers tell her that there is no
fire and demand she be quiet, as her reference to fire
signifies the hell on earth they fear they are entering.
However, she continues to yell, and these passengers
eventually tie her hands, gag her mouth, and beat
her. As with Moshe, no one believes the validity
of her words, and they also think she is mad. Yet
when they arrive at the concentration camp, they see
flames conspicuously emerging from the chimney
of the crematory. The fire is real; humans are being
burned alive.
Although Wiesel’s faith is absolute at the narra-
tive’s open, witnessing and experiencing innumer-
able crimes of abject inhumanity renders it insecure.
Many of these crimes coincide with sacred days,
undermining the reverence he initially gives them.
One Rosh Hoshanah comes shortly after he wit-
nesses a boy hanged in front of an audience, squirm-
ing between life and death for half an hour, because
of his association with an alleged theft. Instead of
repenting to God for the sins he has committed
that year, Wiesel decides: “I was no longer capable
of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong.
I was the accuser, G-d the accused.” As this pas-
sage indicates, Wiesel feels the Lord is the one who
should repent to him for his sins. On this day, he
ceases to pray. Having once believed in God’s righ-
teousness, he is disillusioned by the unbalanced scale
of justice on which he finds himself. If he wants to
remain alive, Wiesel must haul heavy stones for 12
hours a day. In addition, he must watch, without the
agency to intervene, as his father is forced to per-
form labor that is too strenuous for him, abused for