Page 8
University Daily Kansan
Friday. Dec. 9. 1960
From the Bookshelf
A Child's Faith
Of all the crimes by the Nazis, surely the most unforgivable is the internment and murder of so many children. It has been calculated that a million Jewish children perished during the war. Yet many children managed to survive years in the death camps, and now, only in their late twenties and early thirties, have turned out to be the most effective personal historians of life under the Nazis. . .
THE AUTHOR of this piercing memoir of life in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Buchenwald was only fifteen when the war ended for him in April, 1945. By that time he had been separated from his mother and sisters, whom he never saw again; he had seen his own father, after surviving so many "selections," smashed to death. He had lived in Auschwitz with the constant odor of burning human flesh; he had seen children, still alive, thrown into the crematoria; he had seen starving men in the cattle cars transporting them from one camp to another, fighting each other to death over pieces of bread negligently tossed them by German civilians. There are details in his book which can be read only with fresh astonishment at the unflagging cruelty of the Nazis and the peculiarly sadistic frivolity of those who directed this vast system of human extermination.
A YOUNG BOY, after days of being tortured in an attempt to make him reveal where a Dutch prisoner had hidden arms, was put up on the gallows to be hanged. His body was too light and so he kept strangling in front of the thousands of prisoners who had been summoned to watch the execution and who were marched past the gallows. As they went by, Wiesel heard a man asking, 'Where is God now?' And he heard himself thinking-'Here He
is—He is hanging here on this gallowies...
What makes this book unusual and gives it such a particular poignancy among the many personal accounts of Nazism is that it recounts the loss of his faith by an intensity reingious young Jew who grew up in an Orthodox community of Transylvania. To the best of my knowledge, no one of this background has left behind him so moving a record of the direct loss of faith on the part of a young boy. . . .
ON THE JEWISH New Year service in Auschwitz, when ten thousand prisoners said with one voice, 'Blessed be the name of the Eternal,' the young boy defied the Divinity. Whom he had come to think of as blind and deaf: '... but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death? How could I say to Him: "Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory?"
'This day I had ceased to plead I was no longer capable of lamination. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without Man . . . I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like "a stranger. . ."
(Excerpted from a review of the book "Night" by Elie Wiesel published by Hill and Wang. The review, by Alfred Kazin, appeared in the Oct. 27, 1960, Reporter.)
RENE C. TAYLOR
Spanish Lecture Given Monday
A specialist in baroque art and architecture will speak Monday in the Forum Room of the Union at 4 p.m.
Rene C. Taylor, a professor from the University of Granada, will lecture in Spanish on "La Alhambra y El Generalife de Granada." The lecture will be illustrated with colored slides of the palace and gardens of the Arab kings of Granada.
I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.—Anatole France
In addition to his position at Granada, Prof. Taylor is also director of the Casa Internacional (International House) in Cordoba.
from
ALEXANDER'S 1101 Mass.
POTTED PLANTS CUT FLOWERS CORSAGES
UNUSUAL DOOR DECORATIONS AND ARRANGEMENTS
Give flowers for Christmas
The Sleigh Is at the Coach House Filled With
JEWELRY SISSY BLOUSES RAINCOATS CARCOATS PURSES
BLAZERS SWEATERS PAJAMAS DRESSES SLACKS