Dear Ladies of the Book Club,
Next Book: Bring your favorite Christmas picture book to share at Kay Day’s house, 1860 Shoshone Dr., on Thursday, Dec. 11th at 7:00 pm.
If you couldn’t make it this time…come next! Just a recap of our book club meeting tonight …on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Elie Wiesel, NIGHT: It was worthwhile and enjoyable…dark and disturbing … but the discussion was heartfelt …. We hunkered down in Rachel Florence’s basement…each person had so much to add ….and then Rachel brought out pumpkin cake and ice cream … unmm yummers.
…at times we drifted into the topical subject of California’s Prop 8 and the series of temple protests and chapel vandalism… of being prepared and following the prophet… but agreed the attacks on our faith was not even close to what happened during the Holocaust.
BOOK OVERVIEW: This book was a first-hand account of Elie Wiesel’s life in the Nazi concentration camps as a Romanian Jew, age 14. Written in a blunt matter-of-fact-style, but still hauntingly told. His survival and escape from death was miraculous. Here are some pictures I’ve found:
Above…Sighet, Romania His village was emptied in an orderly fashion by the Nazis
Insightful quotes from Elie Wiesel:
“…to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all..."
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference." — Elie Wiesel
“"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
— Elie Wiesel
"Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing... And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..." "'Bite your lip, little brother....Keep your anger and hatred for another day, for later on. The day will come, but not now....Wait. Grit your teeth and wait....That night, the soup tasted of corpses."" — Elie Wiesel (Night)
Above….Elie Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom, 7th man from the left, looking at the camera, head next to the support.
"One person of integrity can make a difference."
"Only the guilty are guilty. Their children are not." — Elie Wiesel
"To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time." — Elie Wiesel (Night)
"I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time." "'Men to the left! Women to the right!'"
"Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother
"'Do you see that chimney over there? See it? Do you see those flames? (Yes, we did see the flames.) Over there-that's where you're going to be taken. That's your grave, over there.'"
"'The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it....
The Wiesel family, the three on the right
A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father? He had felt his father growing weaker…had thought…to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own change for survival. It was good that I had forgotten all that.”
“One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest.”
“On my return from the bread distribution, I found my father crying like a child.”
“Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone.”
“I remained in Buchenwald until April 11. I shall not describe my life during that period. It no longer mattered. Since my father’s death, nothing mattered to me anymore
“I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!” (112)
“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.” (115)
“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”
1 comment:
Thank you so much for sharing what you discussed at your book club. I've never heard of that book before, but I would love to read it (and I'm always looking for books to read). I also really loved the quotes that you posted.
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