y, Adolph Hitler, came to power in Germany in 1933, behind campaign rhetoric that blamed the Jews for Germany’s depression after World War I. Germany embraced Hitler’s argument for the superiority of the Aryan race. Hitler and his counselors developed the “Final Solution” to the so-called “Jewish Question”: a program of systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews. By the time Germany was defeated by the Allies in 1945, the Final Solution had resulted in the greatest act of genocide known to the world: 6 million European Jews had been mass-murdered. The greatest numbers of these were killed in concentration camps, in which Jews were gathered, imprisoned, forced into labor, and, when they could no longer be of use to their captors, annihilated.In Elie Wiesel’s native Sighet, the disaster was even worse: of the 15,000 Jews in prewar Sighet, only about 50 families survived the Holocaust. In May of 1944, when Wiesel was 15, his family was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, in Poland. The largest and deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of more than 1.3 million Jewish deaths. Wiesel’s father, mother, and little sister all died in the Holocaust. Elie survived and emigrated to France. After observing a 10-year vow of silence about the Holocaust, in 1960 Wiesel published Night.Writing about the Holocaust means confronting one’s own memories of horror. Elie Wiesel could and did not write about the Holocaust for ten years after his liberation from Buchenwald. For Wiesel, and for many of his fellow survivors, what happened in the concentration camps is not only too awful to describe, it is also in some sense intensely private To write about another person’s suffering and death is, to an extent, to appropriate their memory. And there is an important Jewish tradition, a tradition honored explicitly or implicitly by many Holocaust survivors, to respect the memory of t...
