Elie Wiesel writes of a terrifying past about his personal experiences as a Jewish man. “What for Elie Wiesel was a traditional and idyllic boyhood in an orthodox Jewish family came to a dramatic end with the arrival of the Nazi armies during the spring of 1944” (Kolbert 324). “In 1986 Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize, cited for his “commitment, which originated in the suffering of the Jewish people, [and] has been widened to embrace all oppressed people and races” (Kolbert 323). He tells how he feels through a particular character and expresses his ideas. Creating an in depth personality, Elie makes his characters come to life as they develop. “The language of Night is deceptively simple, language that gives the reader the illusion of understanding the unspeakable situation” (Bosmajian 1). The purposes of Wiesel's books are to warn the general public of what has happened in world history. “His personal project has been to keep the wounds of Auschwitz open by repeatedly pouring the salt of new literary reconstructions upon them, and thus to prevent the collective Jewish memory- and his own- from quietly letting the wounds heal” (Wieseltier 529). The Holocaust is an event that many try to cover up. Elie Wiesel tells his stories with honestly for the reason being that he never wants something like the Holocaust to happen again. Nevertheless, his art is wholly individual (Friedman 528). “He has spoken at forums and on university campuses around the world” (Kolbert 328). Reading Elie Wiesel’s work is the backbone to understanding the Jewish Holocaust. “He is able to confront the horror with a nakedly self-exposed honesty rare even among writers who went through the same ordeal” (Alter 526). “He has approached the Holocaust mainly from a moral standpoint, leaving legalistic and political debates to others” (Kahn 527). Dawn is one of Wiesel’s earlier works, which focuses on Jews life after the Holocaust. “It deals with the desire of a death-camp survivor to join the underground Jewish movement just prior to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948” (Kolbert 325). “A death camp is a camp whose basic purpose was to kill minorities” (Rogasky 7). Wiesel’s character, Elisha, faces a sititution where he must kill a man he is deeply trying to hate. He wants to hate so that the pain of the kill will not be as bad. He wants to hate so that he has a reason to tell others as to why he pulled the trigger. “Having lived through the reign of terror in the camps, he now must gather enough courage to kill the enemies” (Kolbert 325). The reader experiences the thoughts that go through Elisha’s head from nightfall until dawn the next morning when the kill must take place. Elie creates an image that shows how the Holocaust is forever a part of life. The constant memory of a torn childhood is always within Elisha’s brain. Wiesel's works are all intertwined in the confusion of the Holocaust. He writes to inform and scare the people of today about the past of yesterday. Elie Wiesel uses character development and theme to express these ideas.
Elisha in Dawn is a perfect example of character development through Wiesel’s book. “The torment of survival brings him to question seriously and reject the Jewish moral” (Knopp 1). Elisha shows growth over a period of time. He is the sole survivor of the Holocaust in his family. “About 8,301,000 Jews were alive in 1939. 5,978,000 of those Jews died at the concentration camps, meaning that 72% of the Jewish population had been killed” (Meltzer 190). When he is let go from the camps of the Holocaust he is alone. I had met Gad in Paris, where I went, straight from Buchenwald, immediately after the war. When the Americans liberated Buchenwald they offered to send me home, but I rejected the offer. I didn’t want to relive my childhood, to see our house in foreign hands. I knew that my parents were dead and my native town was occupied by the Russians. What was the use of going back? No thanks, I said; I don’t want to go home. (Wiesel, Dawn 131). Gad is seeking the Jews. His goal is to have them all come together so that they can protect themselves. Gad ends up turning Elisha into a terrorist. “If today, I am only a question mark, he [Gad] is responsible.” (Wiesel, Dawn 132). Gad did not ruin a good life that Elisha had because Elisha had no life. All that Gad did was take Elisha and make him part of a Jewish group. Elisha was not forced to do anything. He just never knew that by excepting Gad’s offer he would become a terrorist. Elisha’s innocence had now been left behind as his character developed. Furthermore, Elisha developed when he talked about the experiences that he had with the girl at the Holocaust rescue committee. “Elisha seems to have never had anyone that he loved or really cared about, but when he finally did he really regret it” (Leviant 530). Her name was Catherine and she was the only other person at the camp who spoke German like Elisha. She liked the opposite sex, and particularly she liked little boys who were thinking of death. She liked to speak of love to little boys, and since men going to their death are little boys she liked to speak to them of love. (Wiesel, Dawn 160). Elisha always went on walks after all of the camp ate dinner. One evening when he was about to go on his walk Catherine asked if she too could go with him. They talked and it eventually got to the point where they were going on a walk together every night. They would hold hands and be affectionate towards each other. The last night of camp Catherine wanted to make love to Elisha and he all of the sudden became very nervous. Catherine, I said, first there is something I must tell you........ No, no! she cried. Don’t tell me anything. ........What I have to tell you is this, I insisted: You’ve won the game. I love you, Catherine......I love you....... Poor boy! You poor boy!......She liked making love with little boys who were going to die; she enjoyed the company of those who were obsessed with death. (Wiesel, Dawn 164-165). Elisha’s heart had been broken and that night as he ran away from Catherine he cried. He was so upset because he thought that he had found someone that loved him back. “It is said that Elie Wiesel had no real love in his life after his parents died at the concentration camps; he could never adjust to loving someone because he thought that they never would love him back” (Stern 529). This changed Elisha as a character because from this point on getting close to a female was not easy at all. Elisha developed by changing from a victim to an assassin. “Elie Wiesel himself was someone that never would become a terrorist, it is said that he wrote Dawn to see what it would feel like to be on the other side” (Alvarez 527). Elisha wanted badly to believe Gad that he had not become a terrorist. Deep down inside Elisha knew that Gad did not want to fight for the freedom of young Jewish children. The tables had turned on Elisha as he replaced his terror of the Germans with acting like them himself. The task that he now had ahead of him was to kill John Dawson. It all related back to when he told Gad “I accept.” (Wiesel, Dawn 137). He thought he had only accepted to be a fighter of freedom but what he really accepted was murdering someone he did not even hate. Elisha went from being the one murdered to the murderer all because of Gad. Elisha’s whole life had changed and developed when he accepted to do this duty. The main character in the Night is a boy named Eliezer who is developed right from the beginning and his personality gets more and more evident. “The relation to God is brought about through the language of prayer, as Moche, the mystic Beadle of Sight, tells Eliezer: ‘Man raises himself towards God by the he asks of Him...... that is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don’t understand His answers. We can’t understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself.” (Bosmajian 1). Eliezer says this in regards to his first night at the concentration camp. He was afraid when the German officers divided the group he was in into two. He had no idea what family members he was going to be with or whether he would be slaughtered or put to work. Eliezer had a solid life as a child and everything slowly was ruined as the Holocaust came about. Names were scarcely mentioned. Elie Wiesel wanted no one to have a real identity besides the main characters. It could be assumed that the book was about Elie Wiesel because “he was born Eliezer Wiesel, 30 September 1928, in Sight, Rumania, a well- known center of Jewish culture, in the region of Transylvania” (Kolbert 323). The story was real life; so as names did not play a part in the real Holocaust they also were unimportant in this book. The Holocaust was a time of terror where everyone’s name was unimportant. People at this time had a number. Eliezer and his father where separated from his mother and sisters. “Wiesel was from his mother and three sisters, Tzipora, Hilda, and Batya, although he was able to remain with his father” (Kolbert 324). Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father’s hand: we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother’s hand. I saw them disappear into the distance: my mother was stroking my sister’s fair hair, as though to protect her, while I walked on with my father and the other men. And I did not know that in that place, at that moment , I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. I went on walking. My father held onto my hand. (Wiesel, Night 39). This book is written with such simplicity that it makes it even more emotional to read. “Eliezer’s experience at Auschwitz- Buna is shaped by the gradual stripping from him of everything he loves. There is the blind struggle for existence at all cost, but along with it the meaning of life is lost” (Bosmajian 1). Eliezer and his father were now going to be alone. When a family was separated, there was no time to hug good-bye. At another point in the story Eliezer backs down from helping his father. His father asked one of the gypsies where the bathrooms were, The gypsy looked him up and down slowly, from head to foot. As if he wanted to convince himself that this man addressing him was really a creature of flesh and bone, a living being with a body and a belly. Then, as if he had suddenly woken up from a heavy doze, he dealt my father such a clout that he fell to the ground, crawling back to his place on all fours. I did not move. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, before my eyes, and I had not flicked my eyelid. I looked on and said nothing. (Wiesel, Night48). At this moment Eleizer had lost all faith in what he knew was right and wrong. Then he describes how if this had happened a month earlier he would have jumped up and fought the man. The reader sees how drained Eliezer really was. “Since most of the action and thought in Wiesel’s novels take place on the broadcast level of philosophical or theological generalization, it is entirely appropriate that the argument of the books should repeatedly crystallize in wisdom-statements, whether by one of the characters or by the narrator himself........”(Alter 1). This is how the characters Elisha and Eliezer develop through works of Wiesel. Elisha went from being an innocent boy to a forced murderer. Eliezer went from believing in God to believing in nothing at all. Although these characters developed differently they both were effected by the same event in time, the Holocaust. They went from being right in what they did to being wrong.
Several themes are prevalent in Dawn. The night leading up to the dawn of day is Elisha’s hardest point in time. He knows that when dawn comes he must execute John Dawson who is a British soldier. Wiesel uses a writing technique that shows how Elisha tries to hate Dawson. “Elie writes from the perspective of a witness- storyteller who knows that the essence of his story--filled with unanswered political and theological questions-- is impossible to communicate” (Fine 1). The reason that Elisha has to kill John Dawson is because the English are going to execute David ben Moche who is a Jewish leader. The Jews must show the British that they mean business also by murdering when they murder. Elisha struggles with his duty to kill the seemingly innocent man. Wiesel creates the theme of a war-hating story. “Hate- like faith or love or war- justified everything.” (Wiesel, Dawn 197). “This thought could not save Elisha from becoming a murderer” (Fine 1). The Jews had been through so much and none of the agony of hate or war was ending. When Elisha did pull the trigger and kill he walked off a young man in confusion. He too had been killed inside. “The shot had left me deaf and dumb. That’s it, I said to myself. It’s done. I’ve killed. I’ve killed Elisha.” (Wiesel, Dawn 203). When Elisha said that he killed himself he ment that he killed the last thing in him. Wiesel’s theme was that Elisha took his own dignity, which was all that he had left and killed it as he pulled the trigger. “When Elisha shot that gun he gave into all that had happened to him. He lost all faith and thought he could not make it any further, that he way he killed John Dawson” (Wiesel 2). Wiesel creates a theme of Elisha not wanting to face the present. The present could have been the better times in Elisha’s life but by not realizing this Elisha only thinks of the past. He remembers Buchenwald, where his family died. “Buchenwald was a concentration camp that opened in 1937 on July 16” (Meltzer 190). “For Elisha the world seems to contain only three classes of people, each with its own kind of guilt of complicity: executioners, victims, and spectators at the execution” (Alter 1). This brought forth the future that was coming faster than Elisha wanted. For all of his life he had been the victim and it was something that he began to get used to. He was now going to be an executioner and it was a fate that he did not want to accept. The theme was that Elisha did not want to forget the past and look towards the future. Elisha was a poor boy. He accepted to become a murder and since then all he has done was look back at the past. Elisha has no one because of the Holocaust and Wiesel wants the reader to know that this is what life is like after the Holocaust. “Elie also felt that because he had personally witnessed the most tragic moment in human history, he should somehow recapture his experiences in durable literary form” (Kolbert 324). In Night the Jews’ life was dedicated to God. Eliezer would often reflect on his dissatisfactions with God. “One has no right to say things like that. I know. Man is too small, too humble and inconsiderate to seek to understand the mysterious ways of God.......Where is the divine Mercy? Where is God? How can I believe, how could anyone believe , in this merciful God ?” (81). The characters were hurt physically but also emotionally. No possession or not even God ment more to them than there life. “Indeed Wiesel’s first five works can be read as a sustained developing revolt against God from within a Jewish context” (Knopp and Lustig 1). “He has dealt with Auschwitz, not only on the level of Man, but also that of God” (Alvarez 527). Eliezer and his father are one. He fights with thoughts of helping his father. He sees other people that he loved leave him not by their own will. He sees people who are close to each other die everyday; it seems as if he and his father will never be apart. He vows never to leave his father like so many other people did. Even in the two characters dimmest moments they are rescued because they stay together. Eliezer got advice from one hospital attendant to let his father die and do nothing at all about it. The one night that Eliezer does leave his father is the one night that his father dies. Then my father made a rattling noise and it was my name: Eliezer...........Then I had to go to bed. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive............I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father’s place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn and carried him to the crematory. He may still have been breathing......His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond. I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like- free at last! (Wiesel, Night 112-13) No tear was shed and no word was spoken. “Wiesel is not just a teller of tales; as a Jewish storyteller he is also a thinker, visionary, propounded of an ethical structure (Stern 530). Yet he has felt frustrated in his attempts to communicate and has gravitated toward silence as an alternative form of testimony” (Fine 3). A theme of God being important was prevalent in both Night and Dawn . In Dawn God was not talked about but inferred through the writing; in Night God is directly spoken about. Also the theme of surviving the Holocaust is present directly in Dawn and indirectly in Night .
”In Wiesel’s case the world seems to contain only three classes of people, each with its own kind of guilt of complicity: executioners, victims, and spectators at the execution” (Kahn 527). Elie himself was once a victim. “One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.” (Wiesel, Night 116). As Eleizer looks into the mirror and the reader feels happy for him that everything is over it is realized that nothing is over. “The image communicates the demonic epiphany of a Narcissus locked into the closed circuit of experiences that have robbed him of all interest in and love for life. He cannot love the world, and since the world is reflected in his eyes, he cannot love himself” (Bosmajian 2). The memories that Eleizer has are all that he needs. He does not know what happened to his mother or sisters and he felt no emotion when his father died. He might not have any physical scars but the scars that are right in his mind are all that he needs. “Wiesel has taken his own anguish and imaginatively metamorphosed it into art” (Leviant 530). The Holocaust should have never happened in the first place and Elie Wiesel certainly does not want it to happen again. “After we have listened to what Wiesel has to say,’ the publisher quotes one reviewer as writing, ‘other literature seems meaningless.” (Bromwich 528). This book should instil fear in the reader. The characters are developed with thought and the theme of love is present everywhere. In the re-creation of the struggle to maintain love and in the eventual defeat of love, the catastrophe is once more enacted: the mother once more carries the sister to the gas chamber, God is once more rejected, the father dies once more. But this time it happens in a verbal structure, in a record that preserves and stalls forgetfulness. Night is an homage to such love and its struggle; it is also, however, a denial of forgiveness and expiation, for the look of the corpse never leaves the autobiographer who incorporated the world of Auschwitz into his very being (Bosmajian 2). Wiesel made Dawn have meaning throughout with strong character development and the presence of theme. In conclusion the book brought Elisha’s turmoil to an end. He finally took responsibility for his actions and began to forget his past. Every victim of the Holocaust must do something like this according to Wiesel. Although Elisha did kill a man he killed for the good of the Jews. Elisha had been killed so much inside of himself that he struggled to do the same to another human. Elisha did not want to like John Dawson and wanted to kill him for hate. “Wiesel’s primary themes are madness as lucidity and silence as true communication” (Kahn 527). Wiesel stated that revenge is not the answer to pain. This was proven by showing how Elisha’s actions after the Holocaust only made more confusion and hurt for himself. “It is a strange truth we are made to feel almost everywhere in Wiesel’s fiction of ultimate confrontations” (Alter 526). Elie Wiesel’s recollection of history in Dawn incorporated strong character development and theme in a hope to change and frighten the world. Although Dawn and Night were written about two different times of the Holocaust, after and during, they both instil fear in the reader. Wiesel's works rely heavily on the development of characters and theme to complete this task.