Novelist and playwright François Mauriac (1885-1970), one of France's most prestigious Christian writers, was seventy when he met twenty-seven-year-old Elie Wiesel. In the Foreword to 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.
Mauriac's intense relationship with the young eyewitness leads him to hope that as many people will read Wiesel's Night as read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. The two works deal with the same historical era and are written from a Jewish point of view. However, a diversity of setting and action sets them apart. Anne Frank's journal describes the day-to-day preparations for a Jewish family's concealment from the SS in the annex of a Dutch import warehouse, where they listen to forbidden radio broadcasts and cheer on the Allies as World War II winds to a close. The diary stops short of the family's arrest, separation, and deportation to a concentration camp, where Anne dies of typhus within months of the war's end. A more chilling first-person narration, Elie Wiesel's Night introduces a similar trusting attitude that the war will soon end and leave them unscathed. The terrible irony of Elie's deportation with fellow Romanian villagers and his failed attempt to keep his father alive surpasses The Diary of a Young Girl in the enormity of SS cruelty, racism, and murderous intent to rid the expanding Third Reich of eleven million human beings whom the Nazis labeled as "undesirables."
Mauriac's pairing of the two eyewitness accounts is a worthy suggestion: Any reader captivated by Anne Frank's innocence and stalwart spirit will profit from reading about the collapse of optimism and religious faith revealed in Elie Wiesel's plight. The same irony applies to Wiesel's account: His terror in total isolation and helplessness occurs only months from rescue by Allied forces during the closing weeks of World War II.
