The Siren of Silence

June 2021

In this harrowing memoir, Elie Wiesel recounted his seared Holocaust experiences and memories in the concentration camp. He survived Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald and Gleiwitz, and dedicated the rest of his life to fighting genocide and defending humanity. Compared with so many horrendous nights in this book– the last night at home, in the ghetto, and in the cattle car, the silence of the world was the darkest one, which had plunged six million Jewish lives into a tremendous abyss. As victims, the Jewish people resigned themselves to the fate of atrocity and extermination in delusions; as killers, German soldiers dehumanized themselves by obeying orders and become willing murderers; as bystanders, with indifference, the rest of the world ignored the plight of other social groups and forgot the suffered. In the dark and silent night, unquestioning obedience to authority deprived humans of sanity, compassion, and the courage to stand up for justice.

Confronted with persecution, the Jews suppressed their indignation and submitted to humiliation in a delusion that they would get redemption by enduring the sufferings. When Mioshe warned them of the annihilation scheme, they did not believe; when the Fascist party had seized control in Budapest, they were not worried; when they were shut up in the ghetto, they even felt relieved. As Elie Wiesel recalled, "Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion” (Wiesel, Pg. 12). This delusion to some extent could account for their compliance to the upgraded humiliation. They obeyed the edicts which prohibited them from leaving their residences, handed over valuables to the authority, and wore the yellow star to signal their inferior identity. They just swallowed the insult and resigned themselves to adversity. In their subconscious submission to the coercion, the Jews were deprived of their private property, of their dignity, and of their free will. They followed the order of deportation, cramming themselves in the sealed cattle cars, in silence. They took off clothes, stayed naked, and got disinfected, still in silence. They suffered from starvation, threatened by the selection, and witnessed innocent babies being burned, all in silence. Elie Wiesel later realized how their senses grew numbed, “We no longer clung to anything. The instinct of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us” (Wiesel, Pg. 36). In extreme fatigue, starvation, torment, and spiritual terror, they didn’t crave for their valuable belongings, their beloved ones, their freedom, and their right to live. The Jews, as victims, grew less humane in their struggle for survival. They beat the lunatic lady to silence her from shouting, hit father to death to grab a piece of bread, and abandoned the feeble fellows and even their own fathers for a glim chance of survival. Obedience and endurance were not human virtues, nor were they remedy to evils in humanity.

SS, the heartless perpetrators, served as killing machines with their blind loyalty to their notorious mission of physical perfection and racial purity. Hitler would never be able to kill all the Jews in the concentration camp, nor could he do the collection, deportation, selection, and extermination all by himself. However, his hypnotic fanaticism manipulated an organization that considered obeying orders as the greatest honor. These brutal murderers, with not the least sense of mercy, practiced the selection, and executed the slaughter. They killed the starved one who crawled to the cauldron, and hanged the angel-like boy on the gallows, all “in the name of Reichsführer Himmler … according to the law…” (Wiesel, Pg. 62). But who had the right to deprive an innocent man of lives, and how could the demand of genocide and atrocity become the law? Nobody questioned, nobody dared to question, or worse still, nobody cared to question. SS men were brainwashed in racial hatred and trained to keep insensitive to human suffering. Absolute obedience, to them, was the supreme virtue; therefore, killing became a just cause. In the most deplorable evacuation scene, SS abused the sick and hungry Jews as “flea-ridden dogs”, and indulged themselves in the morbid power of ultimate judgment. “Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of the pleasure. If one of us stopped for a second, a quick shot eliminated the filthy dog” (Wiesel, Pg. 85). When someone chose to hold the candle to the devil, they connived at crimes and grew hardened to human sufferings.

Different from the victims’ submission to orders and killers’ fanatic loyalty to authority, the bystanders were prone to ignoring injustice and eluding from the sufferings of other societal groups. At the very beginning, when the foreign Jews were expelled, the whole community of local Jews in Sighet stood by. Later, in the concentration camp, when the Jews were tortured, the girls who giggled and passed love notes with the perpetrators stood by. When an ethnic group endured genocide, and six million living souls were slaughtered, the whole world stood by. When the boy naively thought that “the world would never tolerate such crimes” (Wiesel, Pg. 33), his father replied in despair, “The world? The world is not interest in us” (Wiesel, Pg. 33). Elie Wiesel felt guilty for remaining silent in their own plight, and accused as well of the silence of human society towards atrocity and dictatorship. How could the world did know and remained silent? In answering this painful question, he said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (Wiesel). Indifference was the accomplice of evil, while empathy was the strongest response to violence and hatred. When there were still ordinary men who threw bread to dozens of starving men and watched with great interest how they fought desperately over tiny crumbs, there would be no hope in humanity. When there were still people who were persecuted and dared not to shout out their ordeal and stand up for their dignity, when there were governments in power who knew everything and remained silent, when there were people who forgot feeling outraged at injustice, there would be no hope in humanity.

Submission might not propitiate hatred, while blind obedience to authority might encourage violence. Endurance of the victimized Jews did not smother the accusation against them, while unquestioning execution of atrocity turned German soldiers into senseless killers. It is only the conscience, compassion, and courage to stand up for the victims, instead of indifference, that makes humans human.