DAY

by Elie Wiesel



"Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more." From Day (p. 13)

Recovering in the hospital after nearly being killed by a cab, a Holocaust survivor struggles with his will to live while burdened with his memories of the past.

Day is much more subtle than the previous two books in this trilogy, Night and Dawn. In fact, it would be very easy to breeze through these 120 or so pages and end up wondering what the big deal is. The heinous things the narrator saw in his life are never discussed, only hinted at. The reader must use his or her own knowledge to fully absorb the questions posed. How does a person go on living after experiencing something like the Holocaust? How does one view normal, daily life as anything but completely frivolous?

This story did not leave me drained and sad the way the others did, but that doesn't mean it made no mark. What would I do if I had seen my whole family wiped out? My whole city? How can I relate to someone who has seen those kinds of horrors? We don't know the past experiences that have made most people we meet who they are and they don't know ours, but with the things that go on in the world today there are many people we encounter who bear emotional scars like these -- scars we never see with our eyes, but we can feel them in our hearts if we try.



See a Reading Group Guide for Day here.

Related Post:

My thoughts on Dawn.

DAWN

by Elie Wiesel



From the back cover of Dawn:

Elisha, a young Jewish Holocaust survivor now living as a terrorist in British-controlled Palestine, awaits dawn, when he has been ordered to kill a captive English officer. Caught between the manifold horrors of the past and the troubling dilemmas of the present, Elisha wrestles with guilt, ghosts, and ultimately God as he awaits the appointed hour for his act of assassination.

If you've read Wiesel's Night, you know exactly how I feel right now and how hard it is to express what I'm thinking. While Dawn is not at all a happy book, it is not one of those books that left me depressed. It left me deeply introspective. Given the same history, can I honestly say that my moral integrity would not have led me to the same acts as Elisha? I would like to be able to confidently say yes. I'd like to, but there is a thin black thread of uncertainty that bothers me. And therein lies the power of these eighty-one pages.

Though this very short novel is about a Holocaust survivor, it is particularly relevant in the time of our current conflicts in the Middle East. The emotions portrayed in Dawn are no doubt transpiring in the hearts of too many. In response to my own thin black thread, I will let the author's own words speak for themselves: "[H]atred is never an answer, and . . . death nullifies all answers. There is nothing sacred, nothing uplifting, in hatred or in death."