TESTIMONY IN TRAUMA: NARRATING THE UNSPEAKABLE IN ELIE WIESEL'S NIGHT

ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 37 TESTIMONY IN TRAUMA: NARRATING THE UNSPEAKABLE IN ELIE WIESEL’S NIGHT Dr. S. Santhi Associate Professor of English Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, Chennai https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17283305 Abstract War has always been a part of human life, whether directly or indirectly and it has long haunted mankind. People often engage in war to attain freedom and to bring peace and harmony to the world. However, even after peace is achieved—following immense hardship, bloodshed, and violence—the wounds and unspoken miseries remain with people for many years. It remains a profound question: why have wars been so terrible, and why do they claim so many lives? Families become rootless, children lose their beloved fathers and mothers, many lose their lives, and countless others are deprived of their cherished possessions and valuable properties. War is always meaningless—it uproots lives and destroys humanity at its core. Literature reflects life. The struggles of human existence are portrayed through literature. Writers use literature as a medium to express the horrors of war. These expressions can take many forms—poetry, drama, fiction, life narratives, memoirs, testimonial narratives, and more. Through these forms, writers give voice to the pain, trauma, and devastating impact of war. This paper, entitled “Testimony in Trauma: Narrating the Unspeakable in Elie Wiesel’s Night,” analyses the trauma and the horror of war through the lens of Elie Wiesel’s war experience in the concentration camp. This memoir becomes a testimonial to the war narratives, speaking the reality of the war horrors on the millions of people. Keywords: Holocaust, Testimonial, Horrors of War, Trauma. The pursuit of power is often seen as central to human ambition, and people tend to place too much importance on achieving it. They are often willing to go to any extreme to attain power. It is viewed positively when people work hard to achieve their goals, but many choose the wrong path to fulfill their dreams or gain power. The world is well aware of the attack by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, between 1941 and 1945. As a result, six million Jews were murdered, and millions of others died during the conflict. Adolf Hitler chose a horrific path of mass killing, or genocide, in his quest for power. The Holocaust happened because of deep-rooted hatred, racist ideology, and a ruthless desire for power and control. During the Holocaust attack, many lost their lives, and the survivors of the Holocaust suffered endless both physically and emotionally. They underwent many physical abuses and emotional trauma. They faced much physical ill-treatment, feelings of guilt, and depression every day in their life in the concentration camp. Many Holocaust survivors were left without homes, lost their families, and were forced to live in displaced places as aloof individuals. These horrors of the Holocaust are very well captured in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. He documented all his sufferings as a survivor of the Holocaust in the memoir. Thus, the present study aims to present the Testimony in Trauma: Narrating the Unspeakable in Elie Wiesel’s Night, revealing the true colour of the concentration camps. Historical Background of the Holocaust The word “Holocaust” stands as the most terrifying chapter in the history of mankind. The whole world was under a life threat when the Holocaust took place in 1933 in Germany. The Holocaust resulted in the death of over six million Jews in Germany by the Nazis. The Holocaust began when Adolf Hitler took charge of Germany. As soon as he assumed power, he wanted to ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 38 wipe out the Jews from Germany, thinking they were the main reasons for the fall of Germany during the First World War. So, he started punishing and mistreating the Jews. When Hitler took full control of Germany, he decided to completely wipe out the Jews, believing that they ruined German culture and looted German treasure. Many Jewish officers were removed from their posts, and many were put into prison. At the final stage, Jews were not allowed to be like Germans. They were given badges to discriminate them from Germans. They were forced to live in the ghettos, where men and women were separated. Children were allowed to be with their mothers, and adult children were allowed to be with their fathers. Many were sent to concentration camps and then to places where they were massacred. The Holocaust became the most terrifying event in the history of mankind. Media was one of the major reasons for spreading the terrible nature of the Holocaust. Apart from media, many newspapers and journals contributed to portray the dark and evil side of the Holocaust. Many writers happened to be Holocaust victims. Many prolific writers have traced the history of trauma in their works. The most notable works are Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Cathy Caruth’s important work Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Not only fiction and memoirs, but also movies played a major role in presenting the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust. They also added their miserable, unspoken, and unexpressed Holocaust traumas in their prolific writing through memoirs or testimonial narratives. Humans are interested in writing their personal experiences whether it is good or bad, they document their harsh realities and their cherished memories in the forms of letters , autobiography , biography, memoirs or testimonial narratives. They are many great writers like Elie Wiesel – Night (Holocaust survivor account), Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl (written during Nazi occupation) Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (race, trauma, and identity in America) Nelson Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom (South African anti-apartheid struggle) Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) – The Autobiography of Malcolm X documented the harsh realities of the experienced they faced in their life struggle. According to Maurice Halbwachs, the objective of memory writing is The memory of a sequence of events may no longer have the support of a group: the memory of involvement in the events or of enduring their consequences, of participating in them or receiving a first-hand account from participants and witness may become scattered among various individuals, lost amid new groups for whom these faces no longer have interest because, the only means of preserving such remembrance is to write them down in a coherent narrative, for the writing remain even though the thoughts and the spoken word die(79). Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor documented his Holocaust experiences in his most famous work Night. He was born in Sighet on September 30, 1928. Sighet is a small town annexed with Romania. He underwent double hardship being a poor child and as a Jew. Though he underwent a poverty stricken condition, he has led a happy childhood being with his parents and with the two sisters. He has deep religious thoughts nurtured by his parents, studied Hebrew, Torah, and Talmud. During the Holocaust time he underwent a big traumatic experience. His family was asked to leave their homeland and was sent concentration camp where his family was separated. Men and women were separated. Wiesel was sent with his father being a male and his mother and two sisters were sent to other concentration camps. Being alone with his father, he felt unhappy, and he was unable to tolerate his pain of being separated from his beloved mother and his loving sisters. He lost his parents and two of his sister in the concentration camps. After the war, being a orphan he lived in French prphanage an dhe later become a Journalist in Paris. Being a Journalist he earned good name and he got into relationship with many Media personals. He befriended with a famous French writer called François Mauriac. He ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 39 used to talk about the suffering of the Jews in Concentration Camps. As Elie Wiesel keeps on listening about the suffering of the Jews, he gets angered listing to Mauriac. He angrily shouted: I said, "Mr. Mauriac"... "ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it." I felt all of a sudden so embarrassed. ... And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, "You know, maybe you should talk about it” (ii). This incident becomes a big moment in his life as it has kindled him to write about his suffering as a person in the concentration camp. He finally writes this as a memoir and he also said a word about writing this memoir: I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writeror my life, periodwould not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory (ii). Elie lived in a French orphanage and later became a journalist in Paris. There, he met French writer. During a conversation, Mauriac repeatedly spoke about the suffering of Jesus, which angered Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel being a Holocaust survivor documented his concentration camps experience in his writings. Night is one such testimonial narratives that speaks about the real and hard realities of the pin underwent by the Jews in the concentration camps. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night was first written in Yiddish, then in French, and later translated into English to preserve personal memory and show the horrors of the Nazi camps. Though he decided to write his suffering as Holocaust survivor, he could take ten long years to complete it as it is very difficult for him to depict the Holocaust sufferings he says: Writing in my mother tongueat that point close to extinctionI would pause at every sentence, and start over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? ... Was there a way to describe the last journey in sealed cattle cars, the last voyage toward the unknown? Or the discovery of a demented and glacial universe where to be inhuman was human, where disciplined, educated men in uniform came to kill, and innocent children and weary old men came to die? Or the countless separations on a single fiery night, the tearing apart of entire families, entire communities? Or, incredibly, the vanishing of a beautiful, well-behaved little Jewish girl with golden hair and a sad smile, murdered with her mother the very night of their arrival? How was one to speak of them without trembling and a broken for all eternity? (iii) As a fifteen-year-old boy in the Nazi concentration camps with his father Elie Wiesel’s Night tells the story of his experience, from 1944 to 1945. The book clearly describes the pain and horrors. He was forced to wear yellow stars, asked to live in ghettos, he was made to travel through crowded cattle cars, facing selections, and surviving the concentration camps and crematoria. The book not only speak about the horror of the concentration camp but also it details the cherished memories of Elie spending with his family members. Then slowly he documents the horrors of the camp. New government in Hungary supported Hitler. They further started to arrest Jewish leaders, they banned Jew from leave their homes and they also took away their most valuable belongings. Then the Germans set up ghettos and moved the Jews there. These ghettos were surrounded by barbed wire, but Elie felt life there was still somewhat normal because they lived with their own people. Many hoped that the war would soon end and that the Red Army would save them. ICSSR Sponsored One Day National Seminar on Literature, War and Memory: Narratives of Trauma and Healing in 20th and 21st Century English Literature 40 Life becomes sadder to Elie because Jews were deported from Sighet in groups. They were asked to go in a cattle cards, it was very hard and it was with full crowd where people can’t even breath properly and about a hundred people were packed into each car. They arrived at Auschwitz at night, where they were met with the awful smell of burning flesh. Families were separated — men and women were sent to different camps, and children were told to go with their mothers. Others, including the elderly, women, and children, were sent to the left — to the crematoria. That night, Elie saw the mothers and children being burned alive in the flames. Sufferings and Survival Nazi Camps Elie had undergone cruel and unbearable suffering in the concentration camps. All the people in the camps were given a number. Elie’s number was A-7713. They were kept in hunger and believed that work would make them free, but it was not like that. They were given continuous work. So, every day Elie and his father became very weak. As they passed the selection process, they were made to work as laborers. All of a sudden, on the arrival of the Russian troops, the Nazi leader moved the Jews to different locations. Elie was moved to Buchenwald. The journey became extremely hard for him because throughout the journey, he had to go without food and water. As he was not given proper food, he says: “I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time. Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That’s all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread” (p. 115). Being a very weak person, Elie thought about the condition of his father in the other concentration camp. He felt so bad for his father as there was nobody to take care of him. Eventually, his father died on January 28, 1945, which brought Elie a sense of relief rather than grief. At last, all their suffering came to an end with the entry of the American soldiers who liberated the camp and freed the remaining prisoners. Elie’s testimonial narrative serves as a powerful dogma for revealing the true picture of the atrocities of the Nazi camps. His trauma memoir Night reflects the sufferings and hardships like hunger, overwork burden, separation, genocide undergone by many of the Jews in the concentration camps. His memoir not only speaks about his personal suffering but also serves as the thunderbolt to unlock the unspeakable torture and the traumas of the Jews to the world. Hence, Elie Wiesel’s Night strongly serves as the testimony in trauma: narrating the unspeakable sufferings of the Jews. References Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser, University of Chicago Press, 1992. Wiesel, Elie. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel, Hill and Wang, 2006.