Night, by Elie Wiesel: Part II

"'I've got more faith in Hitler than anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.'" - The faceless man in the hospital, pg. 77

I like this quote a lot. It's really sad, of course, but it's well put and mostly true (I won't say completely because I don't know the history of the Jews very well).

It's true because people tend not to keep good promises to others. Politicians, for example, when they want to get elected, like to give impressive and nice-sounding speeches to everyone about how they're going to help them, what they're going to do for them, blah blah blah, but in the end they don't care, and they don't do anything. Confucius talked a lot about that, and how one's words should never exceed one's actions. This reminds me of the book "Animal Farm" by George Orwell, and how Napoleon gave big speeches about everyone being equal, and how he would treat everyone right, but in the end he just becomes a drunk and a tyrant and orders people killed. Or the movie Buscando a Miguel, in the beginning, and all Miguel's ploys to get elected, as well as his hypocrisy and contempt for the people he said he wanted to help (people are stupid because they're poor. Just for that, I think he deserved everything he got). It's much more usual for people who promise horrible things to keep those promises than for people who promise good things to keep them. Like Hitler, as the man said.

"An SS man would examine us. Whenever he found a weak one, a musulman as we called them, he would write his number down: good for the crematory." (pg. 66)

I found this curious because there had to be some French people in the concentration camps, and in French musulman means a Muslim. Is calling weak people Muslims some sort of racist slur? I know that Muslims and Jews tend to dislike/mistrust each other. And if they hate each other, it would probably be pretty offensive to a weakling to be called that. Is it actually supposed to be an insult to the infirm? Or does no one have any idea what a musulman is and just call people that for some reason that only they know? I find it kind of sad that in a place where people are being brutally tortured and murdered every day because of their religion, they still have the inclination to hate other people because of their beliefs.

I don't think Confucius would approve of this book. because of all the very un-filial moments in it. One of them was the pipel who beat his father in page sixty, because he hadn't done the kid's bed properly. There were also two kind of parallel events, one where a priest's boy tries to let his father die so that he only has to take care of himself (pg. 87), and the other when Eliezer himself admits to being glad that his father died because now, he also could take care of himself only (pg. 106), although he's redeemed by the many other very filial things he did, such as risk his life helping his father escape from the crematories (pg. 91). And the worst of all is on the train, when the boy Meir murders his father to get his morsel of bread (pg. 96). Unfortunately, everyone else then discovers the bread and chaos ensues. So in the end, father and son are both dead (and for one tiny piece of bread!).

I liked this book, although, strange as it may sound, the book made the Holocaust sound better than I thought. Maybe it's because I've read too many exaggerated books/articles on concentration camps (I once had a morbid obsession with them), but the Nazis seemed kinder in here, there didn't seem to be hundreds of dead bodies lying everywhere, and the people seemed to be treated better than I'd heard. Although someone in the book did mention that the concentration camp they were in wasn't that bad, so Eliezer could just have been lucky (actually, I just realized how stupid that sounds. Let's say luckier than other Jews in Europe). Still, this was a great book, and I have to admit I found it more interesting than some of the other texts we've read so far.