Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Nobody can read this book, let alone review it, without feeling humble. It was written by an Israeli journalist in his thirties about what happened to a Hungarian Jewish boy of fourteen in a German concentration camp. It is, however, an autobiography. But it is not merely an account of what Germans did to Jews. It transcends racial polemics and reaches up to become a document about what man has done to man.

     When the war reached him, Elie Wiesel was a child, his head full of the poetry of the Old Testament, playing with his younger sister in the garden of the synagogue of a little town in Hungary called Sighet. When it ended he was an old man of not yet twenty. His mother and father and sister had been killed. This book tells, without rhetoric or self-pity, just how it happened. The really frightening thing about our generation is that there is nothing as big in its goodness, as Nazism was in its evil. After reading this book, it will be increasingly impossible to understand how the Russian Stalinists could go on being actively anti-Jewish, after what had happened during that war they did so much to win. One might have thought that Hitler having failed to deprive mankind of one of its parent races, might have succeeded, by that very attempt, in putting an end to anti-Semitism forever.

     Mr Elie Wiesel is a journalist, not an artist, but the predicament he found himself in, as a child, has caused the man to write better than he would otherwise have been able to do.

     What is most clearly brought out in this book is, that right up to the very last moment, even after having been warned by others (whom of course they dismissed as insane), nobody could believe that it was going to happen, and indeed how could anybody believe that in the middle of the twentieth century, in the very heart of civilized Europe, little children could actually be shovelled into gas-ovens in the presence of their parents. This is the true explanation of why it was allowed to happen.

     This book, a factual record, is a human document of the utmost importance. It shows without glossing over any embarrassing details and without pulling any punches just how human beings do react and do behave under such tremendous stress. It tells of the kindness and the cruelty, the heroism and the savagery, and of the terrible selfishness that desperate tyranny brings forth in its victims. For this alone it would have real value. One thing, however, that it does fail to achieve is to impress upon the reader just how huge the scale of the tyranny was. For six million human beings, as many or more people than the whole population respectively of Denmark or Holland, Ireland or Belgium, Norway or Portugal, suffered exactly the same fate as the few hundreds one meets, before their deaths, in the pages of Mr Wiesel’s restrained book.

     Yet even this desperation was not final. Israel was being resurrected from its millions of dead, Zion has risen up again from the gas-ovens and the smoke stacks of the crematoria. History which had seen those small children herded across Europe, hungry in cattle trains, to be thrown into the flames of a charnel house, now sees other small children, happy and playing, running and laughing, on the feast of Purim, accompanied by toys and decked out in party dresses (for Purim is the Mardi-Gras of the Hebrew calendar) through the gardens adjoining the main street of the capital of their own nation.

     Yet I can’t help feeling that I have failed, not only the author, but also his parents and his sister, to whom this book is dedicated, and who were killed in those gas-chambers. Perhaps I should have asked the editor to reprint François Mauriac’s foreword to this book instead of this review. In the Knesset, the House of Commons of Israel, there is a seat always kept vacant, except for a handful of Galilean lilies on Remembrance Day, in memory of six million people murdered by the Nazis. This book would not be out of place, among those flowers.