Night by Elie Wiesel
John Pistoia
" Night. No one prayed for the night soon pass. The stars were only sparks of the great fire which devoured us. When this fire has been extinguished, one day, there would be nothing in heaven, but only of the stars off, eyes dead.
There was nothing else to do but go to bed, in the beds of the absent. Rest, regain his strength. "
is a passage from the autobiographical text by Elie Wiesel, which describes the raw and naked experience in some camps (Auschwitz and Buchenwald).
Elise, a young jew, just fifteen years, was deported with his family, having known life in a ghetto : a tragedy that will affect millions of people over the years rampant irrationality, the emblem of the destruction of reason.
The destruction of reason by the consequent long season of hatred and cynicism and barbarism, has led humanity to be lost on a dark night, where even the stars express discomfort without adjectives. But that season of madness and the various Nazi fascism, that have tarnished the Europe of the twentieth century (note, the twentieth century!) Has really been the fruit, bitter, the death of reason? Or why it has been folded, clearly, following an aberrant logic, because the man slaughter other human beings in the name of "Race, the most voracious of all idols" in the name of absolute power? So do not irrationality of delusion in a sunrise but slow, gradual, inexorable disintegration of man's humanity.
Wiesel's testimony is dramatic. Expressed with clarity and disarming sincerity, simplicity suffered. More than a few images that stay in mind as you read the pages like a real novel, a novel, though, where everything is terribly true, deeds and misdeeds that actually happened, and many torments experienced by the same author.
The young Elie soon loses her mother and sister (the tender Zipporah), lose the faith (God is dead before those chimneys!) And the risk of being deprived of his own humanity, after becoming only a number and stripped of everything: clothes, name, dignity.
Elie is released, even after losing his father, the camp of Buchenwald on April 13, 1945, following the arrival of Allied forces against Nazi fascism.
Only in 1955, Wiesel is able to publish a voluminous testimony of his dramatic experience.
concise edition released in 1958 under the title La nuit , through the efforts of F. Mauriac. In 2010, the twenty-first edition by the publisher Giuntina.
on the memorial, I saw many adults have little desire to remember. Many young people careless. The day the memory could become a ritual, cold and bureaucratic. The same invitation to students to read texts on the Holocaust without this being accompanied by a healthy conversation sets, paradoxically, to expand the islands of intolerance and laxity.
has happened and will not happen again, why continue to talk ? In this sentence a bit 'dell'imperturbabilità the synthesis of disenchantment. Yet it is not. Atrocities have always occurred, and the Nazi barbarism is cruel and very close in time, even if the light of reason seemed to be triumphing over Europe, as recalled in the introduction Mauriac volume. More hideous crimes have occurred (the Gulag, for example). Other cruelty are still making today in many parts of the world without them even speak properly. Nothing is taken for granted for granted. The reason of man is fragile and can always be used against himself. The only weapon you can understand reality, to prevent failures. The memory, memory, knowledge are essential antidotes for a tomorrow that is not a relapse into silence that night who took me for ever the desire to live .
Elie Wiesel
Night
Giuntina 2010
