A sad day. Although much of what he wrote was controversial, he remains my favorite author I was assigned to read in three separate occasions in high school.
I think Wiesel has done much good and his writing and very public campaigns to insure that the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten are what he shall be remember for. Still, he is a man and a man is nothing, if fallible. In his memoirs, "All Rivers Run to the Sea", he exhibits a certain hostility when his writings are questioned; he quotes from his essay "A Plea for the Survivors":
"You who have not experienced their anguish, who do not speak their language and do not mourn their dead, think before you offend them, before you betray them.… Wait until the last survivor, the last witness, has joined the long procession of silent shadows whose judgment one day will resound and shake the earth and its Creator."
Some allege that parts of Night are too implausible and historically inaccurate. But then again, I think he wrote it as a novel rather than a historical document.
I think for a lot of people, it's simply impossible to believe that people could be that cruel. Most of us have not seen and blissfuly have not lived through the horrors of World War II. I feel like this element, more than anything else, drives a lot of the nonsense views that the Holocaust or the wanton slaughter of people the Japanese deemed inferior is a made-up number or that it "wasn't that bad" and so on.
I remember when the Holocaust was being discussed in school and having to read books like Night in school and I was actually fascinated by this; the depths of good and evil that people can do are simply unfathomable. A British journalist wrote about the aftermath of the Battle of Shanghai when he visited what was once a densely packed suburb, "I saw only 5 Chinese, who were old men, hiding in a French mission compound in tears."[1]
