Night to Remember

"We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." – Elie Wiesel [1Wiesel E. Night.2nd ed. Hill and Wang, New York2012Google Scholar]. I was 14 when I first read Night, one year younger than the memoir's protagonist. I finished the book in one night, caught in its glare of suffering and injustice. The author, Elie Wiesel, describes his adolescent experience of abject loss during the Holocaust as he is uprooted from his home and shuffled from concentration camp to camp, losing dear family and friends along the way. Night instilled in me a deep compassion and duty to my fellow humans, and it remains a fulcrum to my ethical formation. Wiesel writes: "I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer—or my life, period—would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory." [1Wiesel E. Night.2nd ed. Hill and Wang, New York2012Google Scholar]. My ears continue to ring with Wiesel's injunction to remember: "To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time." [1Wiesel E. Night.2nd ed. Hill and Wang, New York2012Google Scholar]. I was therefore baffled to learn that this seminal work was on a list of books that had been banned by a number of schools, including the Texas district where my mother teaches literature. Other recently banned books cover subjects spanning history, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Voices that have so often been ignored are now actively forbidden listeners, denying children and adolescents opportunities to explore a spectrum of stories that instructively reflect and refract how they see themselves and others. These books open young minds to a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives that can scaffold their understanding of the world and their place in it. In the preface to my copy of Night, Wiesel describes the challenges he encountered in selling his book when it was first published because it was "considered morbid and interested no one," with some even protesting that there was no need to "burden our children with the tragedies of the Jewish past." [1Wiesel E. Night.2nd ed. Hill and Wang, New York2012Google Scholar] He positions this origin story as a counterpoint to his present, in which youth in America and elsewhere were reading the memoir as part of their school curricula. This change he attributes to a broader shift in societal attitudes toward the past: "In the fifties and sixties, adults born before or during World War II showed a careless and patronizing indifference toward what is so inadequately called the Holocaust. That is no longer true." [1Wiesel E. Night.2nd ed. Hill and Wang, New York2012Google Scholar] It is wrenching today to witness the recrudescence of censure towards books, like Night, that unsettle and question the oppressions of the status quo. When we limit the stories children and adolescents can read, we lose opportunities for them to engage more deeply with themselves and others, to normalize and validate difference, and to create a more accepting and curious society. We stifle their ability to appreciate complexity and contemplate the darker regions of our past, a practice that is necessary to reckon constructively with humanity's capacities for good and evil. In reflecting on his rationale for writing Night, Wiesel asks himself, "Was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one's knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature?" [1Wiesel E. Night.2nd ed. Hill and Wang, New York2012Google Scholar] That discovery, though it may be uncomfortable, is crucial to developing a critical consciousness. This year, our adolescent medicine primary care clinic launched a reading program called Turning Pages, in which we give patients a book at every annual physical—a small but meaningful act of inviting diverse stories into our space. I have seen patients thrill to find copies of The Hate U Give, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The 57 Bus, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (all banned elsewhere in America) on our shelves. These are voices that deserve to be heard, not silenced, and we need collectively to make space for them. As we daily confront strident political threats to non-discrimination, reproductive rights, and gender affirmation, we need our books and our bodies to speak out in remembrance of how easily a neutral stance can perpetuate the erosion of human rights. If we do not speak up for others, as the saying goes, in time there may be no one left to speak up for us. Let us remember the shadows of the past as well as the light that shines through to the other side, a light that can guide our next steps toward a more just world. As Wiesel writes, "The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future." [1Wiesel E. Night.2nd ed. Hill and Wang, New York2012Google Scholar].