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Though the word ‘Holocaust’ has become the most common cipher for one of mankind’s greatest crimes, many Jews and other rememberers of 1939-1945 object to the borrowing of this biblical term to name Hitler’s mass murder.
Why? Because a ‘holocaust’ is a burnt offering that satisfies God. Who, it is asked, can think that the extermination of European Jewry served any purpose, let alone the pacification of an angry deity?
Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Shoah, is known as a Nazi hunter. It would be more accurate to call him a Rememberer. Hunting down Nazis and bringing them in from cushy retirement in the four corners of the world is best understood as a subset of Wiesel’s conviction that silence in the face of such barbarity—practical denial of its destructive malevolence in space and time—is the greatest sin.
Night is not silence. It is dark, eloquent, hateful memory. It is sophisticated proclamation that measureless horror took place, even if we can neither mark its precise shape nor comprehend how a cultivated continent could welcome, nurture, and implement evil’s Endlösung.
Night is the dark story of a young Rumanian Jewish boy’s loss of nearly everything save his capacity to remember as human beings do. Wiesel was that young boy. In adulthood, he will not allow his readers to sidestep the savagery that took his family and so many of his people from him.
Night falls darkly on those who remember. It blots out the tepid dusk of forgetfulness. It is more terrible than amnesia’s cold comforts.
Yet hope resides, barely visible, within it.
Choose to read this tale of the Night.
Canter Bridge 
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