Excerpt From Night
Background: The narrator, Elie Wiesel, is about 12 at the start of this book and about fifteen in the excerpted passage. Night is his true and firsthand account of the horrors of the Jewish holocaust. At this point, Elie and his fellow Jews have been in the concentration camps for about three years. The German guards command them to march to another camp because the Russians are invading Germany. Any jew who falls behind is either shot or left to freeze in the German winter. The first leg of the journey they cover forty-two miles nonstop plus another hour of marching. Then, they rest and resume marching for another day nonstop. Finally, they reach the concentration camp at Gleiwitz. Exhausted, they collapse in the barracks, and here the excerpt begins:
Some Kapos [German soldiers] rapidly installed us in the barracks. We pushed and jostled one another as if this were the supreme refuge, the gateway to life. We walked over pain-racked bodies. We trod on wounded faces. No cries. A few groans. My father and I were ourselves thrown to the ground by this rolling tide. Beneath our feet someone let out a rattling cry:
"You're crushing me . . . mercy!"
A voice that was not unknown to me.
"You're crushing me . . . mercy! mercy!
The same faint voice, the same rattle, heard somewhere before. That voice had spoken to me one day. Where? When? Years ago? No, it could only have been at the camp.
"Mercy!"
I felt that I was crushing him. I was stopping his breath. I wanted to get up. I struggled to disengage myself, so that he could breath. But I was crushed myself beneath the weight of other bodies. I could hardly breathe. I dug my nails into unknown faces. I was biting all round me, in order to get air. No one cried out.
Suddenly I remembered. Juliek! The boy from Warsaw who played the violin in the band at Buna . . .
"Juliek, is it you?"
"Eliezer . . . the twenty-five strokes of the whip. Yes . . . I remember."
He was silent. A long moment elapsed.
"Juliek! Can you hear me, Juliek?"
"Yes . . .," he said, in a feeble voice. "What do you want?"
He was not dead.
"How do you feel, Juliek?" I asked, less to know the answer than to hear that he could speak, that he was alive.
"All right, Eliezer . . . I'm getting on all right . . . hardly any air . . . worn out. My feet are swollen. It's good to rest, but the violin . . ."
I thought he had gone out of his mind. What use was the violin here?
"What, your violin?"
He gasped.
"I'm afraid . . . I'm afraid . . . that they'll break my violin . . . I've brought it with me.
I could not answer him. Someone was lying full length on top of me, covering my face. I was unable to breathe, through either mouth or nose. Sweat beaded my brow, ran down my spine. This was the end--the end of the road. A silent death, suffocation. No way of crying out, of calling for help.
I tried to get rid of my invisible assassin. My whole will to live was centered in my nails. I scratched. I battled for a mouthful of air. I tore at decaying flesh which did not respond. I could not free myself from this mass weighing down my chest. Was it a dead man I was struggling against? Who knows?
I shall never know. All I can say is that I won. I succeeded in digging a hole through this wall of dying people, a little hole through which I could drink in a small quantity of air.
"Father, how are you?" I asked, as soon as I could utter a word.
I knew he could not be far from me.
"Well!" answered a distant voice, which seemed to come from another world. I tried to sleep.
He tried to sleep. Was he right or wrong? Could one sleep here? Was it not dangerous to allow your vigilance to fail, even for a moment, when at any minute death could pounce upon you?
I was thinking of this when I heard the sound of a violin. The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on the living. What madman could be playing the violin here, at the brink of his own grave? Or was it really an hallucination?
It must have been Juliek.
He played a fragment from Beethoven's concerto. I had never heard sounds so pure. In such a silence.
How had he managed to free himself? To draw his body from under mine without my being aware of it?
It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again.
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget that concert, given to an audience of dying and dead men! To this day, whenever I hear Beethoven played my eyes close and out of the dark rises the sad, pale face of my Polish friend, as he said farewell on his violin to an audience of dying men.
I do not know for how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.
Elie Wiesel Night (1960) Winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize
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