On a global scale, Wiesel the writer chooses to incubate the darkness of his memories for a decade, then, at the age of twenty-six, to heed the urgent request of François Mauriac to unveil to the world a front-row memoir of Hitler's hellish night, the palpable blackness that fills his eyes with smoke, his nostrils with the stench of scorched flesh, and his ears with inarticulate cries of the dying. The particularized scenes he flashes on his verbal screen become mere suggestions of a reality that only Holocaust survivors can share. Even though words will always fail his purpose, he persists in recreating his battle against the sooty residue that coats his soul and robs him of his most precious tie with childhood — the orthodox faith that motivated him to pray, read, study, and tread the path of Hasidic Judaism.
In Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he recalled a young man discovering "the kingdom of the night." Like Dante winding downward on a horrific spiral into Hell, young Elie questions how such negation of light can rob the twentieth century of its progress in human relations. At the age of fifty-eight, Elie the Nobelist confronted the reality of the metaphoric night: the silence of apathy, the wordlessness of bystanders who knew the truth of Hitler's death camps but who took no action, made no objection. Like the lone crier who alarms the village to fire, theft, or massacres of old, Elie the Nobelist, Elie the cavalier, finds no rest in his battle against the incessant fall of night. Wherever the shroud of inhumanity descends — on prisons, battlefields, or the pathless flight of refugees — he stirs himself to sound the alarm, to bid the world to strike back at an enveloping cynicism that tempts humanity to turn aside and say nothing.
