Elie Wiesel's New Preface to Night - Warnings for the Future

No one can argue the importance of a book like Night to the world today, but Elie Wiesel's perspective has somewhat changed since the original version in 1958. The evolutions he has gone through in personality are a part of many larger forces. To a great extent, everyone changes as they live. Part of the change in Elie Wiesel is due to his own maturity and life and experience and part of the change is due to the very world around him changing.

Elie Wiesel has shifted as he has matured. He can look back on his life now and understand the importance of his being a witness to these horrific events. He claims that "without this testimony, my life as a writer-or my life, period-would not have become what it is and that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory" (Wiesel 1). He understands the enormity of this book in our society and this event in the history of the world. Wiesel now understands his own life in a context very different than he did in 1958. Night is no longer a book simply about the Holocaust; it is a book discussing his role in this world as that of a witness. It is a book that his entire life and identity hinge upon.

In the new Preface, he discusses the difficulty of bearing witness to events that happened and being able to discuss them so that others would understand. As he rereads the original version, he understands that there were truths that he blocked even from himself as the writer. For example, he does not say that the infants thrown into the fiery ditches were alive. As a witness, it helped him to believe that the babies were dead so he told himself that. More recent investigations of events of the Holocaust tell the reader that the babies were indeed alive. He tries to clear up some of these ideas in the new version. He wants to tell the truth in a deeper, rawer form today. Society can handle it better today. Schools and libraries are no longer afraid to tackle the "tough" issues, even if they are "tough." As a society, we no longer are concerned with sheltering people from the truth.

Part of the change in Wiesel is the fact that the world around him has also changed. For a long time, people showed general apathy about the events that happened during the Holocaust. Now there is renewed interest as evidenced by the Holocaust museum. Publishers and schools did not have the courage that they have today. Society was not ready to hear of the horrors he describes; today society is ready. The Holocaust has become part of our very culture. People understand today that we are losing "witnesses." People who survived the Holocaust have died; many more will die soon. People understand the importance of these memories. "To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time" (Wiesel 2). People today really don't want to forget or "sweep it under the rug." They want to remember and pay tribute to all those who died so terribly and unjustly. Because the world itself has changed, Wiesel has changed by living in the world.

Wiesel himself has had many revelations just from the process of aging and maturing. As the world has changed Wiesel has realized that war criminals are still out walking around today. They have lived relatively free lives while so many others died. Today he believes that in many ways, the past has been erased. Today in many parts of the world, anti-Semites exist to tell people that the Holocaust was nothing but a hoax, and there are those who believe that. They are willing to erase a terrible tragedy in our history, which means it has a better chance of repeating itself. Wiesel and others are there to make sure that past is never erased. Wiesel goes on to say that books do not have the power they once had. Television and cinema have replaced reading for many, and his story is one of those that is best dramatized inside a book where the reader can use his/her own imagination to read and re-read and sift through the atrocities at an individual speed. In the new version of the book translated by Wiesel's wife, the language is more personal. He speaks of trust being vanity, illusion as dangerous and faith as childish. This statement itself has shown the maturity of Wiesel. Certainly he has become more cynical, but he must be in order to teach the lessons. To go through an experience like the Holocaust and still live in the world must make a person at least somewhat cynical.

He ends the new preface with the fact that he is many times asked of his response to Auschwitz. His answer is uncertain. What can be the response to an event as horrific as Auschwitz? But he identifies the importance of the word "response" in responsibility. Wiesel finds that responsibility is the key to it all. "The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future" (Wiesel 2). Again, Wiesel understands by living life that his whole life has become about being a witness to this and now he more fully understands the reasons why. He is a witness to and for the world, and therein lays his responsibility in the Holocaust. His story was meant to be told, and he does not shirk from telling it. He adds the new Preface to reflect a lifetimes of looking back on this event and his own written work.