Night

Eliezer Weisel took me as far as pages will, into the Kingdom of Night, the horror of the Holocaust, which he somehow lived to bear witness to. He began his account from the relative calm of his Jewish community in the little town of Transylvania, where he spent his childhood. Initially, the Hungarian Jews had lived peaceably in their community, amidst the raging war, and hoped for the best, despite horrific accounts to the contrary. Eccentric Moishe, a foreign Jews who'd been one of the first to be deported and had miraculously escaped, returned to warn of the fate of the mysteriously deported: the crammed cattle cars, the forced digging of mass graves before filling them, and the infants tossed into the air for machine gun target practice. Despite his shouting from the synagogue, and telling his story from house to house, the people refused to believe his tales. It was too late when they realized his ominous alert was no exaggeration. Elie and his family and entire Jewish community were first forced to relocate into ghettos, then loaded into cattle cars, then sent either to the belching incinerator or the work camps once arriving at Auschwitz. It was here that he watched his mother, stroking his sister's blond hair, forcibly move to the right and out of his life, while he and his father moved to the left. When he and his father spoke together of their loved ones, they spoke of them being strong and making it in a camp. "How we would have liked to believe that. We pretended, for what if one of us still did believe?"
At one point during their imprisonment, rumors swept through the camp that Hitler had made it clear that he would annihilate all Jews before the clock struck twelve that night. One neighboring cell mate spoke blankly of this prophecy: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people."
During the inmates death march through frozen terrain, shortly before Elie's father succombs to dissentary and dies, one brave inmate had managed to clutch his violin, under his blanket. It was here, that the young musician from Warsaw gave his final concert, leaning against a post with dozens of other frozen and dying men who had been trampled and left behind to die piled around him. He played a fragment of a Beethoven concerto, one he'd been forbidden to play as a Jew, "bidding farewell to an audience of dying men." "Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence." A solitary fragment of peace.
Elie's words from his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speach deeply challenge me. "And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivites become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment-become the center of the universe."