Neutrality In Elie Wiesel's Night

“Neutrality helps to oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,” Elie Wiesel stated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Elie Wiesel, the author of the memoir Night, was a victim of the Holocaust. At the age of fifteen, in May of 1944, he and his family were deported from his hometown to Auschwitz. Auschwitz was one of the largest concentration and death camps in which political prisoners experienced forced labor, cramped living conditions, and food deprivation, along with harsh punishments for disobeying officers or refusing to work. This was part of a larger event known as the Holocaust, initiated by Hitler and his Nazi political party, which was the mass murder of Jewish people, LGBTQ people, Roma people, Polish people, Slavic people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other members of the political opposition. Hitler’s goal was to ‘purify the human race,’ and he vowed to eliminate anyone who was not his standard for the perfect human. Consequently, …show more content…
Is that why my manuscript was rejected by every major publisher?” (Wiesel x). Publishers wanted to stay away from intense topics that are difficult to write about, read about, and understand, let alone experience it. Even attempting to comprehend the cruelty human beings are capable of is terrifying, yet that is the reason it must be talked about. If one distances oneself from the horrors humans are capable of commiting and transforms people into caricatures of the worst parts of themselves, then one is able to refuse to acknowledge what people are capable of. This leaves people, especially those with less societal and political power, vulnerable. Wiesel, despite resistance, shared his