Before
I selected Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel’s Night
and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell
To Manzanar, I viewed them a completely separate books with their
independent value. I had chosen them as part of my “Super Six” as I like to
call my book list for this course because I had either read or heard of both
books during my undergraduate days. It was not until I began to read Houston’s
autobiography did a rush of memories flood my mind. “Wait a minute!” I said out
loud while reading on the bus. “I remember now! Elie Wiesel was talking about
so much of this, too, with Jewish people, of course. And to think it was all
born out of the same war, happening to different groups of people at the same
time!” That was the beginning of the comparison that I now present to you, the
reader.
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From
the beginning of time, we have been distinguishable from one another by skin
color, language, physical location and a host of other natural and fabricated phenomena.
Empty rhetoric this is not--I firmly believe that no matter what the eyes tell
us when we look at one another, no matter how strange other’s words sound to
our own ears, we are, in essence, far more alike than different. Unfortunately,
it often takes unspeakable tragedies to acknowledge what I sincerely regard as
fact. So is the case with Wiesel and Houston. Though they were separated by
geography, we see profound similarities
in the ways their settings helped shape their experiences, attitudes and
beliefs-- their character. In many ways, Elie and Jeanne’s lives
were united, paralleled by “the human condition”. Though complex, rich and
quite unique in their own right, the main character’s lives in both Night and Farewell To Manzanar are wrought with struggles of similar
important issues, like community (including “self” and “the other”), faith and family.
Elie Wiesel and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston contended with internal and external
forces for a relativity short chronological period of time, the profundity of
which caused indelible long-term effects.
The style of Farewell
To Manzanar is easy to identify. Jeanne’s voice, with assistance from her
husband, was her own. Written thirty years after leaving Manzanar, Houston
wrote Farewell… as if she were
recounting her life to a friend who stopped by for a long weekend. It is clear
that she told us of the hard times her family and others in the camp faced, but
her true understanding of the events were relayed as if a child (as she was
during the internment) were telling them. That is because “at seven, I was too
young to be insulted.”
Houston’s life saddens us insofar as the reader is
able to sympathize with her for being an innocent child who suffered cruelties
that were disguised as protection for a greater cause, a different group of
people. It is free from the true
criticism that I would have liked to have seen, but its absence is acceptable
because of the perspective from which Jeanne spoke. Her telling of her
experiences is as engaging as it is tolerable. You actually feel drawn in,
wanting to learn more about this little girl, her family and the other Japanese
families who were subjected to unconscionable indignities sanctioned by the
United States of America, the land of the freedom and the home of the brave.
By contrast, in recounting the tragic circumstances of
his life, Elie Wiesel spoke through Eliezer, a fictionalized characterization
of himself. That does not make the events less true. Can we really blame him
for creating a proxy to distance himself from the physical and emotional abuse
he suffered and witnessed? Night, gives
us unfathomable insight into the inner struggle of a man, a fight that was
caused by the atrocious acts that were carried out by individuals who tortured
and slaughtered millions of innocent people. It is not difficult to see, from
my previous comments, that the tone of Wiesel’s memoir is primarily gloomy, sad
and serious which left me feeling angry, despondent and in utter disbelief. I continued to read because like Elie/Eliezer
(and scores of other readers), I unrelentingly grappled with every horrific physical
and emotional blow that was dealt while somehow continuing to cling to a
fleeting morsel of hope.
Family
The
disruption of the Wakatsukis’ and Wiesels’s lives was caused by events well
beyond their imagination or control. World War II (1939-1942) was being fought
on a global scale. Battles raged overseas as well as on the home front. Whether
for issues of religion or race, people were imprisoned around the world for being
different from, which made them an imagined threat to, the ruling majority. The
effects of the war hit home when in 1942, under President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, the United States government ordered the
Wakatsuki family and over 100,000 other Japanese-Americans and resident
Japanese “aliens” to leave their homes and relocate to one of ten remote,
military style camps. (Italian- and German-Americans were also affected by this
decree because we were at war with Germany and Italy as well.)
If
we briefly turn our eyes from California where the Wakatsukis lived, we can
focus on the tragedy that struck thousands of miles away in Europe when
Eliezer’s, his family’s and the lives of other Jews were quite literally ripped
apart. In 1944, they were forcibly removed from their homes, thrown into
concentration camps including Auschwitz/Birkenau (in modern-day Poland) and
Buchenwald in Germany and further separated by sex-- men with men and women
with women. (Elie stayed with his dad while his three sisters remained by their
mother’s (Sarah) side. Sarah and Tzipora, his little sister, died in the war.
Hilda and Beatrice also later died.)
One
saving grace is that the Wakatsukis were able to stay together during their
dislocation. Jeanne makes us smile as
she recalled how her once close-knit family lived in relative comfort and
enjoyed simple pleasures at home like dinner time together. All thirteen of
them could fit around the large wooden table and enjoy noisy conversations while
eating delicious, home-cooked food. We
are quickly overcome with sadness and disgust when our attention is brought
back to their crowded, unsanitary barracks in Manzanar, a camp about 230 miles
outside of Los Angeles, CA, the scene of many events that drastically altered
their lives.
Papa
Wakatsuki had been arrested on suspicion of being a spy before the family was
relocated to Manzanar. With the head of household gone, and after a few weeks
in the mess halls (typically rooms where soldiers eat together), the remaining Wakatsukis
stopped having their meals as a family. (It was hard for her elderly
grandmother to leave their barracks; Jeanne and her siblings tried to find
better food in other blocks or simply passed time eating with their friends.)
This undoubtedly undermined Wakatsuki’s unity and contributed to the
disintegration of their family structure. The physical proximity of her family
became irrelevant as the emotional distance between them could be measured in
miles.
After
spending a year in Fort Lincoln detention camp near Bismarck, ND, Papa returned
to his family a broken man. Like the cane he used to support his leg, he began
to turn to alcohol to brace himself against his inner demons. Papa became so
out of control that his threat to beat Mama with his cane was only thwarted by
a punch in the face by Kiyo, the family’s youngest son.
Similarly,
though he was comforted by the companionship, the time that he spent with his
father contributed to Eliezer’s emotional and spiritual conflict as much as the
harsh conditions led to his father’s physical decline and ultimate demise. The
beatings, the torture, the experiencing of and witnessing to the brutalities in
Auschwitz and Buna, another labor camp, had all but destroyed both men-- mind,
body and soul. Sadly, Eliezer’s father died
shortly after arriving at the last concentration camp. He succumbed to a culmination
of beatings he sustained because he was sickly and audibly in pain caused by
dysentery, an inflammation of the intestines. In a cruel twist of fate, the
United States liberated Eliezer and the surviving Jews from Buchenwald in 1945;
Shlomo died several months before his freedom.
Faith
To
some, night is a time of reflection, rest and rejuvenation. Others fear the
night for the unseen ominous creatures and events lurking in the dark. Throughout the Old and New Testaments of the
Bible, we are reminded that only God’s light can drive out darkness. Eliezer arrived at Birkenau/Auschwitz at
night. He questioned who God really was as he entered an unknown, dark
world.
As the war raged on around him, Eliezer fought
furiously with the one that raged inside
of him. We know that he constantly prayed. He believed in an
omnipotent God. He believed that nothing seen could be shaken. If nothing
existed without God because God created everything, what kind of God would have
created an abyss like Auschwitz? Was he that unabashedly cruel? Worse than
that, he probably was no God at all. The fact that he continuously prayed and
struggled with these questions makes us understand that Eliezer maintained a
measure of faith in God even though God may have revealed himself as disloyal
to Eliezer.
Jeanne
did not subscribe to religion in the way Eliezer did. Faith was not an issue of
keeping her family together, and its lack was not to blame for her family
falling apart. She noted that her family followed some of their ancestor’s
Buddhist traditions when they lived Ocean Park. It was not until she was in
Manzanar that she began to be gain an interest in Catholicism much to her
father’s disapproval. It is likely that because of their deplorable living
conditions, Jeanne identified with the female saints who were horrifically
martyred for their beliefs. In that way, religion (or faith) would not be seen
so much as something Jeanne depended on to make sense of the world she lived
in; she embraced it to provide herself with another world to which she could
escape.
Community
(and “Self” Vs. “The Other”)
Polish-Jewish
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman spoke of social death as a condition of groups not
being accepted by society as fully human. This phenomenon is evident in regard
to blacks who were victims of American slavery and Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Likewise, Eliezer could see that the brutality inflicted by the Nazis had also
caused the prisoners to engage in a type of social suicide.
Seeing
the extent of a group’s degradation at the hands of other human beings weighed
heavily on Eliezer’s soul. With all of his might, he fought to fall victim to the
newest form of cruelty realized as Jews rising up against Jews. It was a
barbarity born as the direct offspring of their abominable circumstances.
Eliezer
was horrified by the way he saw men treating their own fathers. On the train to
Buchenwald, he was an unwilling witness to a son beating his father to death. He
was once told by a Kapo, or fellow prisoner-turned-supervisor, that in the
camps, “there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends”. Though he did often
think of him as a burden, (would he really mind if, in his weakness, his father
laid down in the snow and died?), Eliezer’s love for and solidarity with Shlomo
reactivated his innate drive to maintain his humanity and try to keep himself
and his father alive.
Being
forced to prove their loyalty to the United States via a two-question oath
continued to further weaken the Wakatsuki family, and it turned the Japanese
prisoners against each other. Jeanne’s
father and her brother Woody answered “yes” and “yes “on the questionnaire,
agreeing to serve in the US armed forces and
swearing allegiance to this country while renouncing any allegiance or
obedience to Japan. When he went to a town hall meeting to defend his decision,
Papa was branded a traitor, and a man attacked him. Liked the feelings that
swelled inside of Eliezer, I can only imagine the war that raged inside of Papa
as he publicly declared his allegiance to the very country that had imprisoned
his family, accused him of being a spy and refused him citizenship. Back at the
barracks, he cried as he sang the first line of the Japanese national anthem.
The
concentration and internment camps caused dissension among family members and for
those individuals forced together. They were united by not by blood, but by
ethnicity and religion as well as the fear and hatred others had for them.
Nonetheless, it is important to note that the circumstances brought about a
degree of creativity with forged a sense of community. Through Wiesel, Eliezer
spoke of the organization that existed in the concentration camps in Nazi
Germany. They identified individuals who served, among many things as cooks,
hygienists, police officers and social workers. At Manzanar, there were also
cooks, (who took pride in the long lines they saw outside their barracks), along
with makeshift construction workers and seamstresses who made do with the
supplies issued by the United Stated War Department.
The Wakatsukis left Manzanar after
about a two-year stay at the camp. Jeanne tried to gain a sense of herself
while also trying to figure out where she fit in within the larger American
community. Mixed messages of kindness as well as unspoken prejudices made her
realize that neither she nor others really knew who she had become. One time, trying
to be the exotic “other” only led tension between her and her father as he
accused her of using her sexuality to win a school contest. It was not until
later in life when she reflected on her experiences at Manzanar as an adult with
her own family did Jeanne see how her life, simultaneously Japanese and
American. It was where her life began and her father’s life began to end.
Through Eliezer, we learn that Elie Wiesel being a
victim of and witness to man’s inhumanity against his fellow man did not lead
him to take another’s or end his own life. He suffered long and hard for no
fault of his own. Elie’s relied on his faith in God to persevere and protect
his and his father’s lives. I imagine that the inner strength gained from the
memories of his mother and sisters, his relationship with God and his tireless
love for his father gave Elie the will to live. When his father died, we know
that Elie felt a strange sensation of relief. As Eliezer, he told us that “I
have nothing to say of my life of this period. After my father’s death, nothing
could touch me anymore.” That is probably why Wiesel experienced a 10-year
period of introspection and reflection before writing Night. How grateful I am that the Holocaust did not silence him
forever! What an invaluable resource filled with examples of faith, personal
conflict and courage than can be used by members of any community!
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According to TeachingBooks.net, the Lexile measure for
Night suggests a readability for 2nd-3rd
graders. However, I would not share such a content-specific and emotionally
difficult book with 8 and 9 year olds. I recommend reading it with junior high
and high school students, particularly during the spring in conjunction with
Holocaust Rembernace events. Because it is less complex and told from the
perspective of a young girl, Farewell To
Manzanar may be appropriate for a 6th grade interdisciplinary
Language Arts/Social Studies unit at any time. It might be more meaningful if
share during units on communities, while exploring various multicultural books
on girls coming of age, Asian American heritage celebrations or as part of
Women’s History Month in March. Before reading either Night or Farewell To Manzanar,
it would be wise to activate students’ prior knowledge with lessons and
activities on World War II and related issues like the Holocaust, Judaism,
concentration camps, ethnocentrism, nationalism, etc.
