Literature and Human Rights Study in the Novel of “Night” By Elie Wiesel

LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS STUDY IN THE NOVEL OF NIGHT BY ELIE WIESEL     

-         D.SASISHEELA

      Assistant Professor of  English

      Bharathidasan University Constituent

                Arts and Science College,

                 Navalurkuttapattu,

                 SriRangam,Trichy. 

Human rights means the rights relating to life, liberty, equality and dignity of the individual guaranteed by the constitution or embodied in the international coven an and enforceable by court in India. The constitution of India deals with protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech. Constitution of India dealing with protection of life and personal liberty say that no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.

The question which we have to consider is whether the right to life includes the right to livelihood. We see only one answer to that question namely that it does. An equally important facet of that of that right is the right to livelihood because; no person can live without the means of living.

All laws in  force in the territory of India immediately before the commencement of this constitution, in so far as they are inconsistent with the provisions of this part, shall, to the extent to which inconsistency, be coid. “Law” includes any ordinance, order, by-law, rule, regulation, notification, customer usage hating in the territory of Indian the force of law.

The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, rule, caste, sex, and place of birth or any of them. No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, as a reader of Night written by Elie wieser. This made reflection of his own life experience. It is not an imagination it’s reality.

           

In 1944, in the village of Sighed, Romania, twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spends much time and emotion on the Talmud and on Jewish mysticism. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, returns from a near-death experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the serenity of their lives. However, even when anti-Semitic measures force the Sighed Jews into supervised ghettos, Elie's family remains calm and compliant. In spring, authorities begin shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz - Birkenau complex. Elie's family is part of the final convoy. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can scarcely move and have to survive on minimal food and water. One of the deportees, Madame Schechter, becomes hysterical with visions of flames and furnaces.

            At midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group looks in horror at flames rising above huge ovens and gags at the stench of burning flesh. Guards wielding billy clubs force Elie's group through a selection of those fit to work and those who face a grim and improbable future. Elie and his father Chlomo lie about their ages and depart with other hardy men to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. Elie's mother and three sisters disappear into Birkenau, the death camp. After viewing infants being tossed in a burning pit, Elie rebels against God, who remains silent.

            Every day, Elie and Chiomo struggle to keep their health so they can remain in the work force. Sadistic guards and trustees exact capricious punishments. After three weeks, Elie and his father are forced to march to Buna, a factory in the Auschwitz complex, where they sort electrical parts in an electronics warehouse. The savagery reaches its height when the guards hang a childlike thirteen year old, who dies slowly before Elie's eyes.

            Despairing, Elie grows morose during Rosh Hashanah services. At the next selection, the doctor culls Chlomo from abler men. Chlomo, however, passes a second physical exam and is given another chance to live. Elie undergoes surgery on his foot.

            Because Russian liberation forces are moving ever closer to the Nazi camp, SS troops evacuate Buna in January 1945. The Wiesels and their fellow prisoners are forced to run through a snowy night in bitter cold over a forty-two mile route to Gleiwitz. Elie binds his bleeding foot in strips of blanket. Inmates who falter are shot. Elie prays for strength to save his father from death. At a makeshift barracks, survivors pile together. Three days later, living on mouthfuls of snow, the remaining inmates travel in open cattle cars on a ten-day train ride to Buchenwald in central Germany. Finally, only the Wiesels and ten others cling to life.

            In wooden bunks, Elie tries to nurse his father back to health. Gradually, the dying man succumbs to dysentery, malnutrition, and a vicious beating. Elie's mind slips into semi-delirium. When he awakens, Chlomo is gone. Elie fears that he was sent to the ovens while he was still breathing. Resistance breaks out in Buchenwald. In April, American forces liberate the camp. Elie is so depleted by food poisoning that he stares at himself in a mirror and sees the reflection of a corpse.

             In contrast, Night, an unadorned recreation of events central to Elie Wiesel's separation from his parents and sisters, offers the reader a significant commentary on a single family's disappearance into the bloodthirsty jaws of Hitler's monstrous war machine. The inevitability of death and despair produces a paradox: a heart-rendingly pathetic isolation of a young Jew from his relatives and from his belief in God, and a thrilling last-minute rescue of one of America's most beloved humanitarians from multiple onslaughts of sickness, hunger, fatigue, and emotional trauma.

            Night demonstrates the narrator's willingness to face certain death and to cling to the shreds of sanity that remain. Wiesel's command of details forces the reader to observe vicious dogs, to hear the cries of a befuddled old rabbi, to smell the fear in the fleeing evacuees who race through the night toward an unknown fate, to hear a Beethoven melody pierce the night, and to touch the cold, motionless form of the violinist who has expended the last of his artistry in a musical benediction over a scene of heartless savagery.

Before a poignant face-to-face visit with a young interviewer for a Tel Aviv newspaper, French writer François Mauriac describes his apprehension. After Elie Wiesel knocks at his door, however, he feels an immediate kinship and tells young Wiesel about the trauma he suffered when he learned from his wife about Hitler's cruelty toward children. She had seen trainloads of them at the Austerlitz station, and, at that time, neither Mauriac nor his wife knew about the death camps. All they knew was that these thousands of children had been separated from their parents.

Wiesel says that he is a death camp survivor, and Mauriac is deeply moved. He tells us that Wiesel is "one of God's elect." The elderly Frenchman realizes that the horrors of smoking crematories and their hopeless victims have incarcerated Elie in a perpetual isolation and angst that did not end with the liberation of 1945. Mauriac searches for proof that God is love but has no evidence to counter Elie's grim testimony. He remembers weeping wordlessly and embracing the young journalist.

Night, the first-person documentary that he helped Wiesel publish, Mauriac alludes to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, an optimistic, progressive period of rational thought from which evolved an overthrow of the monarchy during the French Revolution in 1789. Although he believes in the principles of the Enlightenment and in human advancement, a looming sense of the world's regression into barbarism struck him at the beginning of World War I. Mauriac's pessimism didn't reach its height, however, until the Nazi perversion of science produced efficient death camps as a means of ridding Adolf Hitler's dream state of all people whom he deemed unfit to live in it or to contribute to the building of a Master Race. Mauriac's conclusion forms the central theme in the book: Hitler's annihilation of defenseless children constitutes "absolute evil," an act of heinous destruction with no redeeming purpose.

His terror in total isolation and helplessness occurs only months from rescue by Allied forces during the closing weeks of World War II.