Cracking the mystery of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir ‘Night’

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In the realm of research and documentation literature on the Holocaust, a special place is held by Elie Wiesel’s book of testimony “Night.” Originally published in December 1956, it is, after “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the book about the Holocaust with the most copies in print and the most subjected to academic research. The book’s extraordinary sales, together with the distinctive character and personality of its author – Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), who devoted his life to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and to teaching its lessons to the world – have long constituted a challenge to education systems across the world.

“Night” is the subject of dozens of curricula in numerous languages, and international research conferences and symposia about the book continue to be held every year. Wiesel himself gained the world’s acclaim when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and the three highest medals presented in the United States, as well as awards from various European countries, and by receiving 142 honorary doctoral degrees from the world’s finest research universities (including in Israel).

But together with high praise, the book and its author have also been subjected to harsh criticism, focusing both on the book’s content and on its credibility. Was “Night” written just after the liberation of Buchenwald, where Wiesel was incarcerated during the final period of the Holocaust? Was it written during the first two years after liberation, when he was in France, initially in homes for young Jewish orphans who survived the Holocaust, and afterward in Paris, which was beginning to shake off the war’s damage, though the memories of what he had endured were still fresh in Wiesel’s mind? Or was “Night” written, according to his own testimony, around a decade after the end of the war?

The answers to these questions are exceedingly important for gauging the credibility of what the book describes. From my years as the founder and director of the Elie Wiesel Archive at Boston University, I can attest to the fact that Wiesel attributed supreme importance to these questions and always emphasized that his book was not a novel but testimony, and that its contents were the whole truth, as he experienced it personally.

“Night,” then, was originally published in Yiddish in 1956 – in Argentina and France – with the title “…Un di velt hot geshvign” (“And the World Stayed Silent”). It ran 245 pages, and was edited and published by Mark Turkov, and was the 117th title in a series published by the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina. At the conclusion of that edition the author wrote the following:

“But, now, 10 years after Buchenwald, I see that the world forgets. Germany is a sovereign nation and its army has been resurrected from the dead. Ilse Koch, the mean, sadistic woman of Buchenwald, has children and is happy. War criminals walk around in the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past is being wiped out, forgotten. Germans and antisemites tell the world that the story of the six million martyrs is only a legend, and the naive world will probably believe them, if not today then the day after tomorrow.

The letter that Wiesel wrote to his friend David Hershkovitz in 1947.

“I thought to myself: Perhaps it would be worthwhile to write a book from the notes I took in Buchenwald – not that I am so naive as to believe that this book will change the course of history or shake the conscience of mankind. A book doesn’t have the power it used to have. Those who kept quiet yesterday will also keep quiet tomorrow.”

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The two important facts in this passage are that Wiesel made notes while he was imprisoned in Buchenwald, though he did not write the book until 10 years after the Holocaust. Indeed?

The passage just quoted does not appear in the book’s hundreds of editions in dozens of languages that have been published since then. It is self-evident that it did not appear in the French edition of 1958, the English edition two years later, or the Hebrew translation published in 1964. In his memoirs “All Rivers Run to the Sea” (first volume,1994), Wiesel offers a dramatic description, which for many has taken root as the story behind the writing of the book: “I spent most of the voyage [to Brazil] in my cabin working. I was writing my account of the concentration camp years – in Yiddish. I wrote feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading. I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival. I wrote to speak to those who were gone. As long as I spoke them, they would live on, at least in my memory. My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the 10th anniversary of my liberation. I was going to have to open the gates of memory, to break the silence while safeguarding it. The pages piled up on my bed. I slept fitfully, never participating in the ship’s activities, constantly pounding away on my little portable, oblivious of my fellow passengers, fearing only that we would arrive in Sao Paulo too soon.”

Wiesel repeats this description, with minor changes, elsewhere in his writings. In his article “An Interview Unlike Any Other” (in the 1979 book, “A Jew Today”), he wrote, “I made a vow: not to speak, not to touch upon the essential for at least 10 years.” In other words, he felt a need to emphasize that he waited for a full decade (1945-1955) before sitting down to write his documentation of the ordeal he had endured, first in his hometown of Sighet, in Romania, and afterward in Auschwitz-Birkenau-Buna and finally in Buchenwald.

He was liberated from Buchenwald by the U.S. Army, along with thousands of other Jews, on April 11, 1945. Thousands of Jews had been murdered in the camp in the 10 days prior to liberation, so Block 66, the children’s block, where 600 Jewish children and youths were found alive, was of particular note. The 600 young people were offered the opportunity to go to France at the invitation of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and under the auspices of the Jewish organization OSE (Children’s Aid Society). The Americans allowed those who did not wish to go to France to return to their hometowns, and quite a few took that option.

Wiesel, though, went to France, along with the boy who would become Rabbi Israel Meir Lau; his brother, the late Naphtali Lau-Lavie; Menashe Klein (later a well-known rabbi in New York); the future educator Binam Vizhonski; and others. In his autobiography, “A Nation Like a Lion,” Lau-Lavie writes about the days following the arrival in France of the train carrying 400 survivor children from Buchenwald who chose to accept the offer to go to that country, where they were to be hosted at a luxurious chateau in the village of Ecouis. There they were welcomed by a counselor named Rachel Mintz. “Rachel was attentive to the needs of each of us and also gave advice when we asked,” wrote Lau-Lavie. “Rachel encouraged each of us separately to write his life story and his experiences in the war, and she organized a wall newspaper in which many of us presented our first literary works. At least one of us continued his literary mission from there and enriched the world with his works on the Holocaust. That was Elie Wiesel, who came with us from Buchenwald.”

Buchenwald death camp, June 5, 2009: Wiesel (at right) on an official visit with President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and fellow Buchenwald survivor Bertrand Herz.
Oliver Multhaup / AP

That was in June 1945. In that same month, the youths were asked whether they wanted to go to Palestine or to reconnect with the remnants of their family. Following the departure of those who journeyed to Palestine (Lau-Lavie and his brother, a future chief rabbi of Israel, left for Mandatory Palestine on July 3), the others were divided into two groups: About 100 who declared that they were religiously observant moved to a chateau in the town of Ambloy, while the rest stayed in Ecouis. Wiesel was one of those who chose Ambloy, where he met Judith Hemmendinger, an educator, who years later published a book of her own personal testimony about the children from Buchenwald. The foreword was written by Wiesel, tells us that he read the entire book, as was his regular custom before writing a foreword. Hemmendinger writes (in French, 1984): “His [Wiesel’s] first book, ‘La Nuit,’ was written at Ambloy in a school notebook.” Was the book in fact written in Ambloy and not 10 years later? And if not there, why didn’t Wiesel ask Hemmendinger to delete that sentence?

During his period at Ambloy, Wiesel searched for survivors from his family. His older sister, Hilda, happened to see a photograph of him in a French-Jewish newspaper, and through OSE the two met in Paris and were able to track down another sister, Bea (Beatrice). His life throbbed with activity. At this time “Chouchani,” the legendary Judaic scholar, whom Wiesel described as a mysterious genius and phenomenal philosopher entered his life. Chouchani was a living encyclopedia of Jewish knowledge, especially in Talmud and kabbala, as well as in the exact sciences, philosophy, religion and more. Wiesel considered him one of the two people who most influenced him. (The other was the Talmud scholar Saul Lieberman.) He relates that along with intensive study of French and entering the Sorbonne for philosophy studies, he was writing a great deal.

On August 23, 1947, two years and three months after being liberated from Buchenwald, Wiesel wrote his good friend David Hershkovitz, who had gone to Palestine: “I have no news. I’m working like a madman, I hope I don’t become ill. But what do I care… Have I already told you that I want to publish some books? So far I have written two books, and one of them will appear soon. And now I am preparing the second one.”

What were the two books that Elie Wiesel wrote in 1947? Which of them was soon to published? Is it possible that his and his teachers’ testimonies about his writing in Buchenwald and Ambloy are accurate?

Let’s go back to his personal testimony in his memoir about his studies with Chouchani. “Chouchani led me surreptitiously toward a subject that had always fascinated me: asceticism… I took copious notes and then began to write, pages and pages. Maybe someday it would make a book. Why not? I had wanted to write ever since childhood… Early every morning, I worked (in Hebrew) on ‘my book’ on asceticism.

“Of course,” he continues, “I could write my memories of the camp, which I bore within me like poison. Though I never spoke to anyone about this, it weighed upon me. I thought about it with apprehension day and night: the duty to testify, to offer depositions for history, to serve memory.” But a decade would pass before he spoke, before he offered his depositions, Wiesel writes.

Wiesel, in Jerusalem in 2008.

There are, then, two manuscripts: one on asceticism, the other about his memories from the Holocaust. The work on asceticism was written in Hebrew, and we have the original. As for the manuscript about the Holocaust, in the French edition of his memoirs he states (on page 338) that his memories from the Holocaust were written first in Hebrew, but he deleted that bit of information from all the other editions. Moreover, in the French edition, he notes explicitly that the Hebrew-language version of his recollections from the Holocaust, which we know as “Halaila” (“The Night”), was written before he wrote the Yiddish one. In other words, the book’s first draft was written in Hebrew.

Where did Wiesel know Hebrew from? In his memoir, he relates that his father insisted that he learn “modern Hebrew and modern Hebrew literature.” Elsewhere in the book, he notes that in 1947, he held a long conversation in Hebrew with the noted Jewish-French philosopher Andre Neher, who 11 years later would immigrate to Israel. Two years later, in 1949, Wiesel’s knowledge of Hebrew was the basis for his being employed by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, for which he worked until 1972.

Wiesel’s testimony about writing the book in Yiddish was cited at the beginning of this article, when he recalled his voyage to Brazil aboard a ship that also carried a group of Jews who had left Israel and were on their way to Brazil with the aid of a Christian missionary organization. He testified that for 10 consecutive days, he closed himself up in his cabin and typed out his Holocaust testimony, in Yiddish, to the length of 864 pages. However, this account, written 45 years later, clashes with testimony he wrote during the voyage itself. In a letter to a friend in Palestine, he describes candidly how he was spending his time on the trip from Marseille to Sao Paulo: “Well, I’m already in Dakar, thank God, in Black Africa… I am enjoying myself quite well on the ship. I live in constant fear of sea-sickness and I try to evade nudniks [irritating people]. I was spared sea-sickness – but not nudniks. And they are as boring as a Zionist speech. I have become well tanned. Now I look like a Negro, an honorary citizen of the State of Negroes.”

From the two contradictory testimonies about how he spent his time on the ship – lots of tanning on the deck, nonstop writing in his cabin – the question arises: If he spent hours on deck tanning himself, when did he write the book? Is it possible that he boarded the ship in Marseille with the book already written?

With Wiesel on that trip was a good friend, called Nikolas. I discovered long afterward that this was Moshe Lazar, who in 1951 founded the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Tel Aviv University and was its first dean, before taking up a professorship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. About a year ago, while doing research on “Night,” I spoke with Sonia, Prof. Lazar’s widow, who confirmed the identification for me and added details she heard from her husband about the voyage. It turns out that during the crossing, Lazar was closeted in their cabin, editing the Yiddish manuscript of the book that would become “Night.” Which is to say that Wiesel boarded the ship with the manuscript completed.

Wiesel, who corresponded for 45 years with a closest friend in Israel, wrote him 10 months later after his return from South America: “Have I already written you that at the beginning of next year (1956), my book will be published in Buenos Aires? It’s a book about my experience in the camps. A kind of accusatory document. I know very well that it is no longer relevant and that people refuse to read things from the days they want to forget. But I cannot free myself from the nightmare in the book. As long as it remains unpublished, I will not be capable – if only physically – of writing another book.”

The cover of the Hebrew manuscript of “Night.”

In Sao Paolo, Wiesel suggested that Moshe Lazar return to France, while he sailed to Buenos Aires, where the publisher of Yiddish books Turkov was waiting for him and received the Yiddish manuscript of “Night.” But which manuscript did he receive? All the indications are that Wiesel prepared a complete Yiddish manuscript on the basis of the original, short manuscript in Hebrew, which was later converted into a comprehensive manuscript in French. Turkov requested that Wiesel abridge the book significantly. With the abridged 245-page version in Yiddish began the great saga of the book which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies.

Enter Francois Mauriac, the leading French writer of the period, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. The unknown young Elie Wiesel would become a close friend of his. Mauriac promised Wiesel that he would wield his full influence to have “Night” published in French and that he would supply it with a foreword. Mauriac, a pious Catholic, held long conversations with Wiesel, under whose influence Wiesel made changes in the book, notably in the form of deleting passages that highlighted the conflict between the Jewishness of the murdered people and the religion of the murderers. Years later Wiesel would say that the French version of “Night” was the most important and authentic one. Indeed, this fourth version became the most widely sold book in the world and the basis for translations into 40 languages. The Yiddish version was shelved, though it can be obtained now in a facsimile format published, at the initiative of Boston University, by the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The translation from French back into Hebrew was a lengthy and complex process. At the time (the 1960s), Wiesel was the U.S. correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth. At the initiative of Dov Judkovski, the paper’s managing editor, who had read the French edition immediately on its publication, the newspaper decided to publish the book in a Hebrew translation. At Wiesel’s suggestion, Yedioth Ahronoth approached the poet Haim Gouri, who had been a close friend of Wiesel when they were both in Paris. Wiesel expected a quick translation, but it was not to be. By the time Gouri completed the translation, the journalist Shaike Ben-Porat had translated two other books by Wiesel. The newspaper thus had three books by Wiesel, which it published together in one volume titled “At Dawn.” It was only after “Night” was published in the Tarmil (Knapsack) series for soldiers by the chief education officer of the Israel Defense Forces, that the title of the trilogy was changed. It was now called “Night and Other Stories: Dawn, Day.”

But here we need to go back to the first draft of the book, which was written in Hebrew. I found its complete version, and it describes an event that does not appear in any other version. It happened, apparently, in the 1950s: Wiesel found himself face-to-face with his kapo (prisoner functionary) from the Buna camp on a bus in Tel Aviv. That event, which occurred before the book was published in any language, was not included in the book, and it was only about 10 years later that he published a story about it in Yedioth Ahronoth.

Summing up, we have today five versions of “Night”: notes from 1945-1947, which became the first version of the book; the lengthy second version, written in Yiddish in Paris and edited (apparently by Moshe Lazar) on an ocean voyage to Brazil in 1954; the version that was abridged from the full version and was published in Yiddish in Buenos Aires in 1956; the French version, based on and abridged from the Yiddish book, published in Paris in 1958; and the first and original version in Hebrew, which was rewritten as a fifth version but was never completed because of the book’s publication in Yiddish and afterward in French.

Two additional chapters were written for “Night” that were not included in any of the print editions. The first, “chapter zero,” was removed at the advice of Dov Judkovski, and I have no doubt that if it had been included, the book would not have resonated as powerfully as it has. Also deleted was a final chapter, which was very much abridged in the Yiddish version, and in the book we know appears only its final part. It can be read in full in “Against Silence: The Voice and the Vision of Elie Wiesel” (1985, in English), edited by Irving Abramson.

Few people, if any, are aware of the host of versions of “Night” described in this article and of the differences between them. A small example of the variations: The text in Yiddish (page 138) ends with the words, “[When day broke] we found Juliek dead. His shattered violin, which everyone had trampled underfoot, was a desecrated corpse in a breached cemetery. And I don’t know why: the broken little violin stirred greater grief than the dead Juliek.” The English ends: “When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.”

The Yiddish book published in 1956 and the French book published in 1958 are two identical and different works. The French version, which has been translated into more than 40 languages, was written for the global audience. Behind its publication was Wiesel’s patron Francois Mauriac. In his foreword, Mauriac drew a connection between Jesus’ crucifixion during the Second Temple period by the Jews, and the acts of murder committed by Christians against Jews in the period of the Holocaust. He wanted, it would seem, to arouse Christians of all denominations to undertake soul-searching about the crimes they committed during the years of the Holocaust.

Dr. Joel Rappel was the founder and director of Elie Wiesel Archive at Boston University. Today he is a senior fellow at the Institute for Holocaust Study at Bar-Ilan University.