Elie Wiesel's novel Night tells the story of his Holocaust experience as a young teen. The novel, written in a darkly poetic style, leaves the reader wondering how the world could turn a blind eye to such suffering. But it also leaves the reader pondering the resiliency of the...
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human spirit: how could anyone survive such an experience physically, emotionally, and spiritually?
Late in the novel, Wiesel creates a scene that encapsulates several of the story's themes. After a brutal forced march, the prisoners are lying in a heap in a barracks, too tired to move and in danger of being crushed to death. Juliek, the violinist player, cries out that he has lost his violin.
The violin symbolizes beauty, sensory beauty, because of the sound it can make in the hands of an accomplished musician. The conditions in which the prisoners suffer are destroying the beauty in their lives, just as they threaten to destroy the violin in this scene.
Soon, however, Juliek finds his violin and manages to play for the dying men. Later, when Elie awakes, he sees that Juliek is dead and the violin is crushed.
Elie writes:
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I ever forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying?
The images are stark, almost hopeless, in this scene—except for the fact that Elie remembers. His memory of Juliek and the unique beauty of his “concert” means that all is not lost, somehow some of the beauty lives on.
The only musician we learn anything about in Night by Elie Wiesel is a Polish man named Juliek,
a Pole with eyeglasses and a cynical smile in a pale face.
Elie meets him in Buna when he and his father are sent to stay in the musician's block at the Buna camp. Here we learn, from Juliek, that while the Germans allow the musicians to play, he has forbidden them to play music written by any German composers. Of course we understand that is because Hitler considered all Jewish people to be "dogs" who would only contaminate his country's great music--a ridiculous notion, as we all know.
Juliek is transferred to Buchenwald along with many others, including Elie and his father. The march is brutal, as it is winter and they prisoners are given virtually nothing to eat and and have no real time to rest. It is a terrible ordeal, and Elie kind of keeps track of his friend Juliek.
When they arrive at the Gleiwitz barracks, a stopover on their journey to Buchenwald, the survivors of the march are nearly done in and they all fall asleep on top of one another. Unfortunately, this is dangerous because there was a danger of being smothered in the crush.
Elie wakes up that morning and hears a haunting, unfamiliar sound. Once he identifies the sound, he is stunned at what he hears.
A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living? Who was this madman who played the violin here, at the edge of his own grave? Or was it a hallucination? It had to be Juliek. He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence.
Your question asked where the music was played, and this is where: the dark, stifling, unfamiliar barracks of Gleiwitz.
Juliek is playing the violin as if it were his soul, and the music is moving. It is as if those dirty, starving, and defeated prisoners knew Juliek's life and heart as they listened to his music. He is playing a selection written by Beethoven, and it is a beautiful and sacred moment.
For more interesting insights and analysis of Night, be sure to check out the excellent eNotes sites attached below.
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