![]() Situational psychology is crucial to understand their behavior. One cannot blame the middle level leadership for the atrocities committed, of the Nazi forces as they were acting under orders. “Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow,” he asserts, mentioning the initial hesitancy of the world powers to come to the rescue of the suffering Jews in Germany (xiii). Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices” (118). He states, “That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. He argues, “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere” (119). He advises people of all countries to shun complacency and carry out the responsibilities to humankind. Thank you, above all, for helping humankind make peace it’s most urgent and noble aspiration” (117). In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech delivered in Oslo on Decemhe candidly says, “Thank you for building bridges between people and generations. Only then, world peace becomes an attainable reality. Such an orientation needs to be given right from childhood. Change of heart of each individual can only guide the humankind to the portals of peace. The theme of this book centers on his hearty prayer that such gory incidents should never repeat in future. Wiesel admits he is a writer not by choice, but by compulsion. In the end, they were liberated by the Allied forces. He writes candidly, “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (34). ![]() Wiesel was a young boy of fifteen when he was separated from rest of the family but the only saving grace was that his father was with him in those arduous years. ![]() He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” (80) Killing animals has an economic perspective, but killing human beings on a mass scale, with whom there was no personal enmity, was a heinous act. At last, he said wearily: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. Describing one such gory incident he states, “His cold eyes stared at me. Each shifting exercise resulted in fatal casualties of the internees. He, along with his father, was shifted to different camps, and not sure of reaching the destination, each time they thought that it was their final journey. The conditions in the concentration camps were beyond tolerable limits. Nazis threw babies into the gas chambers and killed them by spraying bullets. This is the inspiration behind him to write the book. To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” (xv). He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. Offering further justification for writing this book he states, “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. How God deals with a particular section of humankind atrociously and allows the perpetrators of the crimes a free hand? Notwithstanding this serious and profound confusion, he transcends the bitter feelings and remains an optimist. It relates to one of the greatest tragedies that overtook a particular race, and the story that has emerged straight from the heart of the author. ![]() The author puts a question to himself and gives answers, “Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?”(vii). “Night,” by Elie Wiesel is a small book of one hundred pages, and it depicts the 4 most difficult years of the history of humankind (1941-1945).
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