A Review of Trauma in Night by Elie Wiesel

It is unusual for so short a book to be so weighty a tome, but Elie Wiesel’s harrowing account of his survival from Auschwitz-Birkenau remains essential reading, perhaps increasingly so, in the twenty-first century. The overwhelming sense one gets from reading it is that there are times and places that avoid any attempt of ours to truly empathise. What is meant here is not that all experiences must be heard in a cold indifference. We mean rather that some horrors and depths of human suffering are too deep for us to understand in the fullness of their truth. We can never feel what Wiesel felt, see what Wiesel saw, touch what Wiesel touched, or smell what Wiesel smelled. Even were we unfortunate co-sufferers with Wiesel in Auschwitz, our experience of the place will be coloured by our life experience up to the event, by our psychology, the way our parents raised us. No two sufferings and no two traumas can be coexperienced. Elie Wiesel tells us how Auschwitz was for him, but he can never tell us how Auschwitz would be for us. He can never even reveal in prose the fullness of what Auschwitz was for him, and how he experienced it, coped with it, and survived it. It is in his brevity that he succeeds in showing us the truest glimpse of Auschwitz.