Can it be described?

Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so let’s not linger there.

Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so let’s not linger there. Was there a Holocaust? Until I began preparing this notice I had never looked into the claims of Holocaust deniers. What I found was a volume of assertions that the Holocaust never happened that might make Hitler and David Irving blanch. Very difficult in a different way is how to write about one of the greatest crimes ever and still tell the truth. Can an author who witnessed terrible things write about them while adhering to truth or fact?

Here’s a tough example. The Nobel peace prize-winner Elie Wiesel’s Night is for many the only Holocaust book they will ever read. Although the central character is called Eleazer he is really Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor. Published in 1956, the book, in its original Yiddish form called And The World Was Silent, ran to over 800 pages in manuscript, and few read it. Two years later appeared Wiesel’s redacted and rewritten French version, La Nuit, and soon there- after, translated into English without much hope of success, came Night.

That version still attracts a huge readership. Here is what Ruth Franklin calls the book’s ‘central episode’. In the original Yiddish version Wiesel described the 35-minute strangulation by hanging of an angelic boy. A watching man asks, ‘Where is God?’, and the narrator silently answers:

‘Where is God? Here he is, hanging on the gallows’. That evening the soup had no taste. We hid it away for the next day.

In the English version of La Nuit, following Wiesel’s rewriting, a man watching the boy’s slow death asks, ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’