[In the following essay, Lazarus underscores the role of silence as a predominant metaphor and structural device in Night and The Forgotten.]

One of the striking characteristics of the writings of Elie Wiesel is his ambivalent attitude toward language, and the predominant role of silence in his works. For Wiesel, despite his more than thirty books on this subject, the experience of the Holocaust is still inexpressible and beyond language. “Words have lost their innocence and their power”¹ since the Holocaust. Since language was used to implement the Final Solution, words can never again be completely trusted. Yet in his commitment to truth, to bear witness to the millions of victims of the Holocaust, Wiesel finds that language, however imperfect it is, is man's only available tool. Through the right choice of words, there is the hope of sparing future generations the horrors of another Holocaust.

Language in Wiesel's novels is terse, highly condensed, and unadorned by wordplay. Influenced by the writings of the Eastern European World War II ghettos, Wiesel creates a sense of urgency by employing the sparse vocabulary of those living on the edge of existence. Attempting to convey the infinite solitude of victims of persecution, to express the inexpressible, Wiesel introduces the weight of silence in all his writings. In numerous interviews, Wiesel has repeatedly spoken of his preoccupation with silence, and his commitment to it as an aesthetic device.²

In this essay I hope to analyze the role of silence as a dominant metaphor and structural device in two of Wiesel's novels: La Nuit (1958) and L'Oublié (1989).³ I have chosen these two works because, although written more than thirty years apart, they have many of the same themes: the father-son relationship, the experience of religious faith, and the incommunicability of the horror of the Holocaust. By examining the role of silence in these two works, it is possible to study the evolution of this metaphor and aesthetic device across a range of emotional perspectives and a wide span of years.

Elie Wiesel himself, in a 1987 interview with Jean-François Thomas, distinguishes several different types of silence preponderant in his literary works: there is the destructive silence of the ignorant or forgetful; the silence of victims who have chosen to carry their truths with them to the grave, in the face of torture and injustice; the “biblical silence” of Job, Aaron, or Jeremiah, tormented by unanswerable religious and philosophical questions; the silence of the world during the Holocaust, and finally the inexplicable silence of God. Wiesel has attempted to make silence palpable, almost “visible”, in order to identify, through his silence, with that of all victims: “Aussi j'essaie non pas de refouler le silence, mais de le récupérer à l'intérieur des mots. J'aimerais pouvoir prendre les paroles et mettre là-dedans autant de silence que possible”.⁴

In La Nuit, silence is equated with anguish, despair or death, and has a terrifying, ominous power. Wiesel describes the people of Sighet, Hungary, his native town, who naïvely maintained their optimism that no harm would come to them, in the face of all warnings of their imminent demise. In their refusal to talk about the fate of foreign Jews who had been deported, or to discuss the dire warnings of Moché-le-Bedeau, who had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis, the community, through its silence, has sealed its own doom:

Des jours passèrent. Des semaines, des mois. La vie était redevenue normale. Un vent calme et rassurant soufflait dans toutes les demeures.

(p. 19)

Wiesel depicts the destructive silence of indifferent neighbours in Sighet, who make no protest at the deportation of Jews, thus aiding the Nazi authorities in liquidating the entire Jewish population. He senses them lurking silently behind shuttered windows, waiting for the moment when, like vultures, they will loot the homes of deported Jews:

La ville paraissait déserte. Mais, derrière leurs volets, nos amis d'hier attendaient sans doute le moment de pouvoir piller nos maisons.

(p. 43)

Throughout La Nuit, silence is equated with despair, in the pauses between words or sobs of victims, in the unspoken words understood in gazes or embraces, and in the anguished silence of victims facing death. Wiesel gives weight to these pauses and moments heavy with inexpressible feelings. In an exchange between his father and the townspeople of Sighet, just before their deportation, the words spoken are less significant than what is implied in the silent pauses between sentences:

Des bruits circulent selon lesquels on nous déporte quelque part en Hongrie pour travailler dans des usines de briques. La raison en est, paraît-il, que le front est trop proche d'ici …

Et, après un moment de silence, il ajouta:

—Chacun n'a le droit d'emporter que ses effets personnels. Un sac à dos, de la nourriture, quelques vêtements. Rien d'autre.

Et, une fois de plus, un lourd silence.

(p. 31)

The spoken words of his father repeat the lies which he has been told by the Nazis, while the silent pauses between words indicate the truth suspected by all his listeners, which they cannot voice: that they will be murdered.

Victims in La Nuit trying to express their thoughts and feelings find their words choked and their lips paralyzed. The horror of confronting absolute evil is beyond language, and can only be intimated by the weight of silence. Waking up a family friend in the ghetto on the morning of their deportation, young Eliezer is confronted with an old man with a beard who stares at him as if the child were mad:

Ma gorge était desséchée et les mots s'y étranglaient, paralysant mes lèvres. Je ne pouvais plus rien lui dire.

Alors il comprit. Il descendit de son lit et, avec des gestes automatiques, il se mit à se vêtir. Puis il s'approcha du lit où dormait sa femme, lui toucha le front avec une infinie tendresse; elle ouvrit les paupières et il me semble qu'un sourire effleura ses lèvres.

(p. 33)

The news of their doom is communicated silently from person to person by a look or touch; the events unfolding are unspeakable both literally and figuratively.

In Wiesel's descriptions of his mother and younger sister, marching toward the cattle cars, their silent stares and gestures communicate a depth of anguish that could not be conveyed through dialogue:

Ma mère, elle, marchait, le visage fermé, sans un mot, pensive. Je regardais ma petite sœur, Tsipora, ses cheveux blonds bien peignés, un manteau rouge sur ses bras: petite fille de sept ans. Sur son dos, un sac trop lourd pour elle. Elle serrait les dents: elle savait déjà qu'il ne servait à rien de se plaindre.

(p. 39)

Wiesel seems to draw out silent moments between father and son in La Nuit to give voice to thoughts that can only be suggested, never defined. There is the unspoken communication of hands and embraces: “Je m'en approchai, lui pris une main et la baisai. Une larme y tomba. De qui, cette larme? La mienne? La sienne? Je ne dis rien. Lui non plus. Nous ne nous n'étions jamais compris aussi clairement” (p. 110); the silent, distant gaze of his father next to him when his father seems absent from reality: “Comme il avait changé! Ses yeux s'étaient obscurcis. J'aurais voulu lui dire quelque chose, mais je ne savais quoi” (p. 64); or when his father seems lost to him and to the world near the end of his life: “Père, où cours-tu? Il me regarda un instant et son regard était lointain, illuminé, le visage d'un autre. Un instant seulement, et il poursuivit sa course” (p. 168).

Behind the words of pretence between father and son, regarding the fate of their family, are their unspoken thoughts revealing a truth too painful to express out loud:

Maman est encore une femme jeune, dit une fois mon père. Elle doit être dans un camp de travail. Et Tsipora, n'est-elle pas déjà une grande fille? Elle aussi doit être dans un camp … Comme on aurait voulu y croire! On faisait semblant: si l'autre, lui, y croyait?

(p. 77)

What is left unsaid is more significant and more revealing in La Nuit than what can be communicated through language.

Silence can also convey a complete loss of humanity, as in the poignant description of the narrator's silent confrontation with an SS officer who beats his fatally ill father:

L'officier lui asséna alors un coup violent de matraque sur la tête. Je ne bougeai pas. Je craignais, mon corps craignait de recevoir à son tour un coup.

(p. 173)

Through his terse sentences, his distancing from himself as he describes the feelings of “mon corps”, Wiesel equates silence with a death of will and spirit. Similarly, the final, terrifying image in the novel of his own silent corpse gazing at him in the mirror suggests his total dehumanization, his reduction to an empty hollow shell:

Du fond du miroir, un cadavre me contemplait.

Son regard dans mes yeux ne me quitte plus.

(p. 178)

Silence is a powerful metaphor in La Nuit for the inexplicable response of God to the Holocaust. God is paradoxically both present and absent through La Nuit, “murdered” along with the innocent victims in the camps:

Jamais je n'oublierai ce silence nocturne qui m'a privé pour l'éternité du désir de vivre.

Jamais je n'oublierai ces instants qui assassinèrent mon Dieu et mon âme, et mes rêves qui prirent le visage du désert.

(p. 60)

Though silent, God is present in the prayers of young Eliezer in the camps:

Et, malgré moi, une prière s'est éveillée en mon cœur, vers ce Dieu auquel je ne croyais plus.

(p. 144)

and present as the accused in a silent Job-like interrogation conducted by the narrator:

Aujourd'hui, je n'implorais plus. Je n'étais plus capable de gémir. Je me sentais, au contraire, très fort. J'étais l'accusateur. Et l'accusé: Dieu. Mes yeux s'étaient ouverts et j'étais seul, terriblement seul dans le monde, sans Dieu, sans hommes.

(pp. 109-110)

In the novel L'Oublié, the memory of the Holocaust is resurrected a generation after World War II, through the conversations of a survivor, Elhanan Rosenbaum, and his son Malkiel, and through the latter's visit to their native village in Roumania. L'Oublié has many echos of La Nuit: in both novels silence is often equated with suffering and martyrdom. In L'Oublié, Holocaust victims such as Malkiel's grandfather went to their deaths silently, refusing to divulge the names of other Jews, and refusing to compromise in any way in their faith (pp. 105, 112). Silence in both novels is also associated with the apathy and indifference of those non-Jews who might have prevented the massacre of their neighbours. Elhanan describes the town of Fehérfalu just after its liberation in 1945 as a ghost town (p. 185). The silence and emptiness in the town seem to reverberate with the memory of the dead, and with accusations against their uncaring Christian neighbours:

Partagé entre la colère et l'excès de désespoir, Elhanan se promène dans les rues de sa ville comme un somnambule. Il s'attend à chaque carrefour à tomber sur un ami d'enfance, un cousin, un parent. Il voit constamment son père, sa mère lui fait signe d'approcher … Il veut leur parler, mais aucun son ne quitte ses lèvres. Il est seul. Certes, il a des copains, des camarades, et il s'en fera encore plus dans l'avenir, mais ça n'est pas pareil. Rien ne rompra sa solitude d'orphelin.

(p. 189)

In L'Oublié, Wiesel experiments with new structural and thematic elements of the novel. Abandoning a linear narrative structure in favour of episodic leaps back and forth in time between past and present, Wiesel suggests that human identity is not limited to one's chronological life, but instead incorporates the collective memory of all of one's ancestors:

Malkiel: J'ai quarante ans. Plus trois mille.

(p. 11)

Elhanan: Lui dirai-je l'amour de son grand-père pour l'étrange et merveilleuse communauté d'Israel, qui à ses yeux, s'étend de toi jusqu'à Moïse? Et de toi Tamar, jusqu'à Sarah? Grâce à lui, je vivrai: grâce à toi, Abraham vit.

(p. 317)

To the silence of death of the Holocaust, Wiesel opposes, in L'Oublié, the redemptive force of the collective memory of the Jewish people.

For Wiesel, all language has become compromised since the Holocaust; all language is potentially destructive, whereas silence in the Jewish Hasidic tradition is purity. Wiesel illustrates this Hasidic view of silence in L'Oublié, by his juxtaposition of dialogue between characters, reduced to its sparse, minimalist form, with unspoken “interior dialogue” (ruminations or prayers) of characters. It is through these silent interior dialogues that the principal character of L'Oublié, Malkiel Rosenbaum, finds his roots and his identity.

The spoken exchanges between characters throughout L'Oublié are often terse and superficial, or marred by misunderstandings, quarrels, or gaffes. The following exchange between Malkiel and Lidia (his Roumanian guide) illustrates with some humour the difficulties encountered in an attempt to communicate:

—Je vous parlerai de moi si vous me parlez de vous, dit Lidia.

—Et ensuite?

—Ensuite je saurai.

—Vous saurez quoi?

—Ce que vous souhaiteriez que je sache.

—Justement. Je ne veux pas que vous sachiez.

Elle s'arrête, le toise et émet un petit rire:

—Ce que vous êtes compliqué!

(p. 24)

Throughout L'Oublié, the failures of spoken communication are illustrated by hostile exchanges and misunderstandings, as those between Malkiel and Lidia (pp. 26-27, 137), with Leila (p. 142), with Tamar (pp. 47-48, 303-305), and with Elhanan (pp. 132-135).

The silent ruminations and prayers of Malkiel, on the other hand, enable him to confront his past and his own identity (“Je sais bien: qui écoute un témoin le devient à son tour; tu me l'as dit, tu me l'as répété. … Eh oui, pére. Je t'ai entendu. Et, dans cette ville étrangére, je t'entends encore” (p. 194). Through his experience of reliving vicariously his ancestors' traumatic lives (and of encountering some of the people involved in this trauma), Malkiel is finally restored to present-day life with renewed optimism and hope:

Devant la tombe de son grand-pére, Malkiel revoit Tamar. Au chevet d'Elhanan sans doute. Elle ne punit pas le pére pour les péchés du fils. Nous allons nous marier, Tamar. Je veux que mon pére nous voie unis.

… Et la mémoire de son père chantera et pleurera dans la mienne.

Et la nôtre, Tamar, s'épanouira dans celle de nos enfants.

(p. 311)

The alternation between silent and spoken dialogue, between silence and speech, becomes in L'Oublié a metaphor for the oscillation between hope and despair. Silence has ambivalent connotations in L'Oublié: it is paradoxically both constructive and destructive for Elhanan Rosenbaum. His success as a psychologist working with Holocaust survivors has been due largely to his ability to listen compassionately in silence to his patients' tales, enabling them to heal their emotional wounds. Yet his progressive muteness is also the symptom of an incurable memory disease that frustrates his attempt to transmit his life history and his values to his son.

Silence is associated in the novel with the unjust suffering of both biblical and contemporary characters: of the righteous Job, robbed of the ability to answer God (p. 307), of Haskel, the preacher ostracized from society who became mute when not permitted to tell his terrible tale of the Holocaust (p. 155), and of Elhanan, robbed of his memory and speech, whose final message to Malkiel is left as an incomplete sentence: “Et moi qui te parle, je ne pourrais plus parler, car” (p. 318). The recurrence of this tale of the Jew throughout history who is silent against his will, so prevalent in both L'Oublié and La Nuit (cf. Mme Schachter who is gagged when she tries to voice her prophetic visions of flames to Jews en route to Auschwitz, pp. 49-51), gives it the character of a parable.

Yet L'Oublié ultimately conveys hope in the redemptive power of memory to “give voice” to the silent dead, and to express the unspoken words of a father to his son. The ghosts in Elhanan's native village knock each night at the doors of the town's inhabitants, disturbing their sleep forever to remind them of the victims of the Holocaust (p. 128); the gravediggers Hershel and his blind companion Ephraim call themselves guardians of the memories of the dead (p. 255), suggesting metaphorically the redemptive force of literature to conquer forgetfulness and indifference.

Elhanan's final message to his son is not incoherent language dissolving into silence (like the “message” of the guest speaker at the end of Eugene Ionesco's Les Chaises (1952)). Six lines before his final silence, Elhanan expresses the conviction that his son will find by himself the truth for which he is searching:

Tout en te parlant, je me dis que, par tes propres moyens, t'u découvriras quand même ce que mes lévres n'ont pas pu ou su dire.

(p. 318)

The oscillation in Wiesel's novels between hope and despair, between silence as redemption and silence as curse, reflect his roots in Hasidic messianism. The elements of messianism—the fervent waiting, the hope for redemption, the importance of solidarity and love between fellow human beings as the path to finding God—these elements are all present in La Nuit and L'Oublié. Maurice Friedman has described Wiesel's post-Holocaust faith as the “messianism of the unredeemed”:

Since God has proved an unreliable partner, the Jewish people must base their self-affirmation on their choice to remain Jews and to assume the past of Jewish history as their own. The three-fold elements of this additional covenant are: solidarity, witness and the sanctification of life.⁵

Like Sartre and Camus, Wiesel calls on man to invent values and to affirm meaning in life, despite the absurd, and despite the silence of an uncaring world and of God.

Notes

1. Elie Wiesel, “An Interview with Elie Wiesel”, conducted by Robert Franciosi and Brian Shaffer, Contemporary Literature, 28 (Fall 1987), p. 289.

2. Elie Wiesel in Jean-François Thomas, S. J., “La Vocation d'un Ecrivain: Dialogue avec Elie Wiesel”, Etudes, 367 (July-August 1987), pp. 58-59, and in Robert Franciosi and Brian Shaffer, “An Interview with Elie Wiesel”, p. 291. In the second interview, Wiesel said that all of his books were connected in some way; all were part of one book which he would entitle “In pursuit of Silence” (p. 300).

3. Elie Wiesel, La Nuit (Paris: Minuit, 1958) and L'Oublié (Paris: Scuil, 1989). All further references are to these editions.

4. Elie Wiesel, “La Vocation d'un Ecrivain”, p. 59.

5. Maurice Friedman, “Elie Wiesel's Messianism of the Unredeemed”, Judaism, 38 (Summer 1989), p. 316.