Customer Rating: 
Summary: Hitler is the only one who kept his promises to the Jews
Comment: I read this book when it first came out in the 60's and it made big impression on a young
high-schooler. When I visited Dachau a few years later after joining the USAF and being stationed in
Germany where the hatred of the Jews was still very much in evidence, I remembered the line from
this book that was spoken by a dying Jew who was in the hospital with Wiesel at one of the death
camps he fought to live in, that " I've got more faith in Hitler than anyone else. Hitler is the
only one who kept all his promises to the Jews."
When i first read this book I was mad
at the Nazis for their inhumanity, but after many decades I learned to redirect and balance my anger
at those who led themselves like sheep to the slaughter. Wiesel has an interesting chapter at the
beginning of this book about Moshe the Beadle, who escaped death at the hands of the Nazis and
returned to tell the Jewish community in Hungary about how vulnerable they were. His advice was
ignored, and when the Jews were herded up, they went without a fight as they went to the death
camps, delusional to the end about the true nature of the threat until the Nazis pulled their heads
out of the sand and marched them to the trains.
What I did not remember about this
book until I read it again this week was that the Jewish prisoners fought and scratched, and even
killed their own for a scrap of bread, but did not think that they would best be served to act like
humans instead of sheep and fight back as many did in the Warsaw ghetto. I suspect if they had taken
out one in ten Nazis who rounded them up, there would have been no gas chambers or ovens since the
Nazis would have been depleted to nothing. Wiesel ultimately came to this realization in his later
years.
Wiesel's descriptions in the book are fundamentally the story of those who would
only take bread from the weakest of the flock as they moved from camp to camp, knowing that their
ultimate fate was to die at the hands of the Nazis in the ovens. A scrap of bread to live another
day was the trade-off for their own claim to humanity. It is essentially a study of a refusal to pay
attention to the reality of the threats to the Jews that Hitler and other made, but also a story of
human cowardice on a grand scale.
I can now understand why this weakness only
encouraged the bullies, just as other weak leaders such as the New York Times owners praise the
United Nations, which is only united in calling for the end of Israel and the death of the remaining
Jews on the planet. But just as millions of Jews got on the trains taking them to their deaths did
so without a fight during the Nazi era, millions more are repeating history by ignoring the fact
that sheep do not eat wolf stew. It goes the other way round.
I gave this book three
stars because it is an average. The descriptions of the horrors of what the Nazis did, as well as
what the Jewish inmates did to each other to survive deserves five stars, but Wiesel was essentially
clueless when he wrote this book over 40 years ago in understanding how his own actions and those of
his fellow Jews made them less than human, and thus reinforced the view of many Europeans that they
deserved the ovens that they tended as prisoners until they were too weak to load their own parents
bodies into the furnaces and added to the flames when they were finally selected for the gas
chambers.
Nothing has changed, with the leader of Iran calling for the destruction of
Israel, and the USA being the lone voice calling out for the UN to condemn anti-Semitism disguised
as anti-Zionism. And indeed you have people such as the ambassador from France calling Israel a
"shi**y little country" unworthy of a future, and dozens of American Democrats such as Jimmy
Carter's loathsome new book comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, and other politicians
demanding that the US join the "international community" in condemning Israel for defending itself.
Wiesel did what he did to survive, as did millions of other Jews, but their weakness
invited the bullies to depravity, just as it does today. I suspect that the chorus will be the same
once the Iranian nukes wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. This book is a study in how they will
have brought it on themselves by acting like sheep instead of humans. And of course the world will
look the other way, just as Clinton did when the Hutus slaughtered nearly a million Tutsi's in a
three-month period but chose not to get involved. His approval ratings are off the charts, even
though the holocaust in Rwanda was more intense over a few months than Hitler's was against the Jews
over a decade.
C'est la mort.
But I suspect that Carter will continue his
attacks on the Jews, and his book will be cited on Al Jezera and other propaganda arms all over the
world as justification for supporting jihad, and NY will vote overwhelmingly Democrat in the next
election. Talk about not connecting the dots!! Those dots will probably lead to the death of
millions in the country you cannot find on a map in the Middle East which happens to be called
Israel.
Wiesel finally grew and understood that it is human nature to favor the
"stronger horse" and the political parties in Israel are a reflection of the political delusions in
play in the major cities with large Jewish populations in the US today. It is unfortunate that the
later editions of this book did not include his late awakening of this reality.
If you
are looking for a book that covers this issue in a far better way than this short review, you might
consider Mamet's "The Wicked Son" written by a Jew who understands what is at stake in today's
world. But Wiesel's book is really an embarrassment and a look into how men can become mice, and be
treated as such if they do not stand up for themselves.
As the saying goes, those who
do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and Iran is about to perform a nuclear repeat
of the 1930's because too many around the world would rather look the other way as the UN Security
Council delivers "peace in our time" once again.
