‘Night,'” Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
Unlike other soldiers who returned home from World War II, my father did speak of his experiences – at least some of them, and to me, his oldest son. I remember his admonishment – we should never forget what the Nazis did to the Jewish people over the dozen years they held power. And I never have.
Re-reading Elie Wiesel’s book every few years is a worthy habit. In the 2006 edition, translated by his wife Marion, he wrote in the introduction: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” He is right. Those who grew up like me in the 1940s and ‘50s, in comfortable post-War America amid loving families, and with only the distant, vague threat of the bomb, can never understand the fear of those threatened with abandonment, imprisonment, torture, and death by the Third Reich.
Yet, as I read this book for the third or fourth time, I found myself thinking in broader terms – beyond just Europe, the Jewish people, and Nazis. While true goodness is rare, evil is ubiquitous across all classes, races, religions, and nationalities. It comes in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It infects individuals. But it is political/universal evil that concerns this essay. The human capacity to inflict harm is global. It knows no borders. Consider: Approximately forty percent of the ten to fifteen million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1900 died, either in Africa or aboard ships. Many of the survivors died in captivity. It is estimated that up to twelve million indigenous people were killed between 1492 and 1900, in South, Central, and North America.
Things were worse in the 20th Century. The Nazis killed an estimated sixteen million soldiers and civilians. An estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed by Turks between 1915 and 1923. Approximately ten million Russians were killed between 1917 and 1923, during their revolution. Between six and twenty million Russians and others were killed by Stalin, including about four and a half million Ukrainians during the Holodomor (1932-1933). Forty percent of U.S. prisoners held in Japanese POW camps are estimated to have died. Estimates are that up two million Muslims and Hindus were killed in post-independence India. It is estimated that between forty and eighty million Chinese were killed by Mao Zedong, including the famine (1959-1961) and the cultural revolution (1966-1976). Between 1975 and 1979, the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, led by communist dictator Pol Pot, killed between one and a half million and three million of their seven million population. Today, Iran supports Muslim terrorists around the world, and sub-Saharan African Islamists kill about twenty-five thousand Christians every year. Man’s capacity for evil is untold.
Why? There is no answer. How did Austro-Germany, countries that produced Johannes Gutenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Albrecht Dürer produce an Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler? Why do people have so little regard for the sanctity of life that they will torture, mutilate and kill? Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (the SS) established twenty-five main concentration camps, with over a thousand satellite camps. While still confined to the ghetto, Wiesel wrote: “There no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate…”
Once at Auschwitz, death was omnipresent: “Death was settling in all around me, silently, gently. It would seize upon a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit.” As the Soviets advanced westward in late 1944, surviving prisoners from Auschwitz were force-walked most of the four hundred and twenty-five miles west to Buchenwald. More than half died on the way. Shortly after their arrival, Wiesel’s father died in January 1945. Three months later, on April 10, Americans arrived. Survivors were saved, but at what cost: “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”
This is a short but powerful book. It is still read in some high schools, as it should be, for its message is one we should never forget. But it should also be a reminder that evil lurks everywhere. It is why we need religion and their moral codes of conduct. Evil infested Tailei Qi, the shooter this week on the UNC campus. It is with us today in many parts of China (the treatment of Uyghurs in China’s northwest); in Russia (Prigozhin’s death was no accident). It is visible in Islamic terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We ask again, ‘Why?’. Remembering his own time in the World War I trenches, J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Fellowship of the Ring, has Frodo say to Gandalf: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” “So do I,” replied Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the life that is given us.” Life is not fair. It never has been and never will be. We must play with the cards we are dealt.
We cannot deny evil’s existence. In recent years, we in the West have been fortunate. Democracy and free market capitalism give power to the people, not the state. Evil nations reflect excessive powers granted to, or usurped by, governmental workers. Our Founders, rejecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief that man was inherently good, recognized man’s capacity for evil, so they gave us a federal government with limited powers, with separate but equal branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – separate entities that make, execute, and interpret laws. Nevertheless, the desire by individuals to garner power persists; it is gradual and subtle and has become common in Washington. Evil takes root with a promise to do good, which justifies whatever insidious means are necessary to achieve a desired end. And the silence of good people abets its advance.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was directed at the rise of Fascism and was a warning that no nation or civilization is immune from authoritarianism. Today, while we must remain vigilant of right-wing extremists, we should not ignore the fact that most of the Twentieth Century’s murderous regimes emanated from the left – from communist governments that control the media, along with the educational, cultural, economic, and personal lives of their people.
A re-reading of Elie Wiesel’s classic tale Night is a reminder that evil is real, it is pervasive, and it is contagious. It must be confronted, from whichever direction it comes and in whatever guise it appears.
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