Night and Farewell to Manzanar

Night and Farewell to Manzanar both take place during WWII and tell stories of discrimination. Night tells the well-known story of how people with Jewish descent were treated horribly and how the Nazi Regime was genocidal following under the rule of Adolf Hitler. Farewell to Manzanar, on the other hand, tells a little known tale about how Asian-Americans were sent to reservation-esque camps after Pearl Harbor.

Farewell to Manzanar began in 1942 with the attack of Pearl Harbor and a debate between isolationists and interventionists. This caused America to be scared, selfishly, for itself and they declared war soon after on Japan. After that, many Americans feared Asians to the point where they started moving Asian-Americans out of their houses on the coasts and more together inland. They did not feel safe with Asians near the coast line fearing yet again, another Pearl Harbor. The Asians were put on buses to drive them to the heartland of America. They were allowed to take all the items they can carry and the rest they can either leave behind or try to sell to people on the streets who are mostly con-men. Jeanne's family actually puts most of their objects in a storage center.

Night begins two years later when the Nazi party reached Hungry. Almost automatically the Jews were taken out of their houses, neighborhoods and familiar surroundings to be sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Wiesel, the narrator, happened to get sent to Auschwitz, one of the most well-known and deadliest camps in modern history, in Poland. The Jewish people are forced to leave all their objects behind, and what they do bring will be stolen and burnt. The Nazi Party went so far in stealing they actually would take gold caps off your teeth and would just look in every nook and cranny to make sure they didn't miss something to take. They are sent on trains; similar to the Asian-Americans on buses. However, they are packed together like animals for days with no where to sleep or use the bathroom.

One thing that both types of camps had strongly in common was that it stripped both ethnicities of their culture, food and their language (whether it's not letting them talk at all or forcing them to use the oppressor's language). This could happen at the camp or it could result from families being split apart early on and never being able to meet up ever again. Perhaps, it could be psychological from all the abuse they had to suffer and a new self-loathing or maybe it's just from their culture dying out because they had to worry about surviving more than their beliefs.

Farewell to Manzanar complains that the workers in the cafeteria were making the food inedible for the Asian-Americans because they added sweet sauces to rice. Yet, it was the only food the Asians had a chance of eating, so long lines also ensued outside of the cafeterias and people would wait hours just to get the nearly inedible rice. This shows the conditions in the camp were not great, they did not know anything about the Asian culture and thus was not ready to house thousands of Asians in camps and that the employees did not have to be informed in the positions they were filling. However, I will admit, they still did offer a lot of classes familiar with the Asian culture in the last few years of the camp, mostly by older Asians trying to keep the culture tight within the community.

Night has an even harsher story. They also have to wait in long lines but the food they get is filthy. Pieces of glass and mystery meat show up quite often but the people are so hungry they have turned into savages willing to steal and kill to fill up their stomachs. The Jewish people can no longer be Jewish, they can not study their religion or pray to God. They are forced to live in barracks, like Asian-Americans, stacked together with the smell of human waste and death constantly in the air. By the end of the book not only is the Nazi Regime the enemy but also all the twisted, corrupted people around you who would slit your throat for a piece of bread.

However, in the end both cultures were able to grasp back onto their old traditions and assimilate back into society. That is not to say that communities welcomed them with open arms. It was sincerely difficult but not altogether impossible and the elders were stubborn in their ways on not giving up their practices.

In Farewell, Jeanne happens to win the Spring Carnival Princess where she shows off her exotic youthful sexuality. The ballot counters try to stop her from winning, not because she was dressed in a sexual manner, but only because of the fact that she was Asian. Also, Jeanne's father was against it when he found out his daughter had won, not because they were Asian but because she had betrayed the Asian social principles. Asians, traditionally, are private people and the women are trained to be submissive. When Jeanne won the title of the Spring Carnival it showed that she was now Americanized and could, if she wanted, start living by America's treatment of women. Her father, fearful of this, sent her to a special Asian dance instructor to teach here something about the culture of Asia.

In Night, handing down the Jewish culture was much harder, like most things when comparing these two novels. The Germans forced Jews to break their dietary rules, made them get tattoos (which is against their religion) and violated their religious temples. However, the Jewish prisoners passed down their traditions through stories. The conflict between the Germans, perhaps, made their religious feelings even stronger. Once World War II was over and the Jewish prisoners were set free they were once again able to practice their religion and all the rituals that go with it.

Essentially, after reading these two books, I realized that America has been hypocritical in the past and probably is in the present and will be in the future. WWII needed to be stopped because of the concentration camps but how can someone who was enemies with Germany set up similar, however more lenient, camps in their own motherland? It's easy to look back on our mistakes but what really counts is being able to take from it and use it in the future. America is still young and hasn't had much history to look back on but it does not excuse it for the mistakes it already made.