Since Night contains so many historical falsehoods, the conformist scholars and teachers who comment on the book must quickly learn to present it in a way that avoids discussion of its problematical pages and passages. Generally speaking, there are two major categories of deception in Night. First, there is the utterly mendacious, or implausible. Then there are the plausible claims that are weakened because they contradict the Holocaust’s master narrative. One or the other assertion can be true, but both cannot be true. As an example of what I call the mendacious and implausible, we have Wiesel’s burning trenches, their smoke visible outside the area of the camp compound and possibly for miles around, in which he claims to have seen children burnt alive. Conformist critics accept this eyewitness claim as true. But since the aerial photos, widely available on the Internet these days, show that this mass open-air burning of living multitudes of people never happened, such a belief is unfounded. Thus, the conformist critics simply avoid discussion of the subject.
An example of the second general category, in which a Wiesel claim contradicts the master narrative of the Holocaust, is offered by the episode involving his sore foot. In fact there are two contradictions here. In January 1945, Wiesel allegedly suffered from a case of frostbite, although the reader must construe this malady, since he does not use this word in his novel. Since his feet were sensitive to the cold, one of them began to swell. This event is quite plausible. In a word, it could have happened. Logically speaking, however, and in accordance with the vulgate version of the Holocaust, as it is repeated endlessly in the Zionist media, Wiesel ought to have been sent to the alleged gas chamber at Birkenau, or otherwise executed, for the simple reason that his sore foot should have prevented him from working. (The Holocaust vulgate also claims that an order had been issued in the fall of 1944 to stop the alleged extermination program, but no documentary proof has ever been offered in support of this claim176). But this did not happen. He was not killed. Yet another contradiction of the Holocaust master narrative in this episode is found in the fact that he was not only spared execution, he was operated on and restored to health by a Jewish surgeon at the camp hospital! This episode implies that German medical care, a very scarce commodity during the war years, was routinely given to sick or injured Jews. Yet the Holocaust master narrative states that medical care for inmates at Auschwitz was a sham, if not completely lacking.
There exists a multitude of books, articles and online resources that studiously evade such issues in order to deceive readers, especially young ones. Examples of this method can be found in the many manuals that are available in book form, such as the Student Companion to Elie Wiesel by Sanford Sternlicht or the Sparknotes Guide to Night. Then, of course, there are the Internet resources. They range from Oprah’s Book Club Guide to Night, in which Wiesel himself is featured as a narrator, to the study guide on Night in the series called Cliff Notes, which usually contain a plot summary, biographical information on the author, and critical commentary. Such books are intended for high-school students who must read the book in class as part of the state-mandated indoctrination program that is administered to them in support of our state religion, the Holocaust.
These and other Internet guides all have one thing in common: avoiding direct questioning of the passages in the book that contradict the basic tenets of our state religion. Students read Nightas part of their initiation into a state-imposed belief system, not into independent thinking. Thus, passages that provoke thought are avoided or passed over rapidly without comment. And since the Holocaust is our state religion, the instructors who actually teach this book to students on the high school level must engage in a self-imposed process of mental gymnastics even before they face a class. In so doing, they internalize the untenable belief that everything in Wiesel’s book is true and really happened, because the book is an autobiography. Thus, on encountering events in Night such as those mentioned above, whether plausible or implausible, they must first flip a mental switch, that of voluntary blindness, before setting to work brainwashing their charges.
In order to help such teachers, as well as other readers, who want to understand Night for what it is, a work of fiction, I have created the following list, not exhaustive by any means, of historical problems.
Problem #1: Botched Chronology and Possible Identity Theft
Date of Departure from Sighet
The traditional bildungsroman, or novel of initiation into adulthood, always involves travel away from home as an essential part of the young man’s journey to adulthood. Wiesel’s novel is consistent with this pattern. The hero’s travels will result in the creation of a new man, one who is ready to enter into the adult world. However, in his novel, Wiesel is extremely careless with regard to the basic question of a coherent chronology, and his carelessness extends even to the key issue of his departure from his hometown of Sighet and his arrival at Auschwitz. In an autobiography, in which everything is supposedly true, as Wiesel has claimed many times for Night, something as basic as an internally coherent chronology should be a given.
But that is not the case here. Wiesel seems to have invented dates as he went along, with the result that his story is a hodgepodge of events that take place in an internally contradictory time frame. I suspect that one reason for this problem is that Wiesel may have plagiarized other former detainees’ texts, probably written in Yiddish, for his own Yiddish account, Un di velt hot geshvign. When he published his Yiddish book, his principal intention was to attack Germans and other Gentiles, so he paid little or no attention to chronological detail. The main thrust of Un di velt hot geshvign involved Jewish racial hatred and the need to keep it alive. He had no idea at the time that the book would become the basis for one of the most sacred texts of the Holocaust. Thus Wiesel may well have never even bothered to stitch his various borrowings together into a coherent whole. Later, when Mauriac rewrote Un di velt on the basis of the bridge text that Wiesel had prepared for him, and, in the words of Holocaust theologian Naomi Seidman, “radically transformed” it into a French novel, he apparently concerned himself only with questions of language and style. He left everything else alone. As a result, Night is marred by a serious disconnect between the historical record and Wiesel’s alleged experiences within the context of that record.
When did Wiesel leave Sighet for Auschwitz? The basic textual reference for establishing the novel’s timeline is the Jewish Feast of Pentecost. Wiesel writes:177
On the Saturday before Pentecost (Shavuot), in the spring sunshine, people strolled, carefree and unheeding, through the swarming streets. They chatted happily.
In 1944, the first day of Shavuot fell on Sunday, May 28. Thus, the day described above was May 27. According to Wiesel, the first trainload of Jews bound from Sighet for Auschwitz left the next day, Sunday, May 28, on the Jewish feast day of Pentecost. Wiesel then speaks of Monday (“lundi,” Nuit, 37), then of dawn (“aube,” 38), and then of another dawn (“aube,” 41). He then writes:178Saturday, our day of rest, had been chosen for our departure.
The Jews of Sighet ate their ritual dinner on Friday evening, June 2, and then, the next morning (“le lendemain matin,” 43), that is, on Saturday, June 3, 1944, they left for Auschwitz. Since the trip usually took three to four days, they would have arrived on June 6 or June 7. Yet Wiesel writes as follows about his first full day in Poland:179
It was a beautiful April day. Springtime’s sweet perfume floated in the air. The sun was setting in the west.
This chronology is nonsensical, for if Wiesel left Sighet in June, he could not have arrived in April. It is this incoherence that leads me to suspect a botched job of plagiarism.
Marion Wiesel’s Deceptive “New” Translation of NightThis botched chronology, possibly resulting from Wiesel’s plagiarism of other Yiddish-language texts, helps to explain why a new translation of Night was deemed necessary by Wiesel and his Holocaust fundamentalist backers. With a breathtaking Orwellian stroke of the pen, Wiesel’s wife has attempted to cover over a number of glaring defects in Wiesel’s Night. Thus, the passage quoted above, and on which the chronology of the whole novel is based, “the Saturday before Pentecost (Shavuot)” (“le samedi précédant la Pentecôte”), has now been translated as “some two weeks before Shavuot.”180 By moving the whole chronology of the novel back two weeks, Wiesel and his wife are striving to have Wiesel leave Sighet on or about May 21, 1944, not June 3.
One of the reasons why Marion Wiesel has done this is to bring Wiesel’s arrival at Auschwitz into line with that of the man whose identity Wiesel appears to have stolen, Lazar Wiesel, also from Sighet, but born in 1913. In keeping with the use of retroactive continuity, Wiesel’s wife passes off this mendacious translation as if it were faithful to the original text from La Nuit, for there is no footnote alerting the reader that the original text has been altered through the use of this deliberate mistranslation.
Then, for consistency’s sake, Wiesel’s original description of his arrival in Auschwitz – “it was a beautiful day in April” (“c’était une belle journée d’avril”) – has also been doctored in the new translation to “it was a beautiful day in May.”181 Once again, this has been done without a note to alert the reader to this deliberate mistranslation. It is truly shocking that a widely respected publishing house like Farrar, Straus & Giroux would actually lend its name to such a travesty.
Unfortunately, Marion Wiesel is not the first person to have tampered abusively with her husband’s text in order to make it say what it most emphatically does not say. There is a precedent for what she has done, and the culprit, as far as is known, is the publishing house that brought out the original German translation of La Nuit in 1962.182
In both cases, the counterfeiters seem to have acted in an attempt to correct the strong impression given by Wiesel of never having actually been in either Auschwitz or Buchenwald. In his novel, Wiesel claimed to have seen outdoor burning operations of live victims, while the master narrative of the Holocaust story, by 1962, was centered on the mythical gas chambers. The German falsifiers seem to have been concerned about two things: Wiesel’s overall lack of verisimilitude in his description of killing operations, and his failure to even mention the gas chambers. Thus, the words crematory/ies and crematory oven(s) were simply translated as “gas chamber(s)” in 15 instances. This was done so systematically that the translator by accident even turned the Buchenwald crematory into a gas chamber, although everybody agrees that there was no homicidal gas chamber at the Buchenwald camp.183 In this way, by a simple swipe of the pen, the text of what Wiesel had supposedly seen became more compelling and, at the same time, was brought into conformity with the Holocaust master narrative. On the other hand, Mrs. Wiesel, preoccupied with other matters some 40 years later, concentrates on the narrative blunders relating to the novel’s botched chronology.
Carlo Mattogno’s Accusation of Identity Theft
Carlo Mattogno, in his claim regarding Wiesel’s possible theft of someone else’s identity, emphasizes that the ID number in question was assigned on May 24, 1944. Thus, the dates of June 6 or 7, which I have extrapolated from Wiesel’s chronology in the novel, are off by about two weeks. Furthermore, Mattogno, citing extant records, goes even further, stating that two thousand numbers, from A-5729 through A-7728, were distributed on that day, and suggests that Wiesel stole the identity of a man from Sighet named Lazar Wiesel, a person who might have been a distant relative and who might possibly have been known to Wiesel. Lazar Wiesel is listed in Buchenwald records as born in 1913, and was tattooed at Auschwitz with ID # A-7713 on May 24, 1944.
Such an impersonation would help to explain why Wiesel’s French-language biographer, Saint Cheron, tells us that Wiesel, whose name was Eliezer, or Elie, was actually called “Lazar,” a diminutive of Eliezer, through the end of the 1940s. Saint Cheron wrote of Wiesel that “for many years, until the end of the 1940s, [he] was called Lazar.”184 Thus, what seems like a gratuitous fact of no particular importance in Saint Cheron’s authorized biography of Wiesel could have actually been an attempt to provide a cover story for Wiesel’s theft of someone else’s identity.
Here is what Wiesel writes about his tattoo in La Nuit:185
The three veteran detainees, with needles in their hands, engraved a number on our left arm. I became A-7713. From this point on, I had no other name.
Yet, Wiesel’s tattoo cannot be discerned on any extant photograph or film of him.186 Nor have Elie Wiesel’s personal and medical records ever been made public – if they exist; are they being withheld by the various Holocaust museums and record centers? Thus, there is no way of knowing for sure where Wiesel spent the war years.187
[←176] The only evidence ever cited is the testimony by SS-Standartenführer Kurt Becher, IMT document PS-3762; IMT, Vol. 33, 68f. However, Becher clearly made it up to save his neck, as he confessed to an acquaintance; see Göran Holming, “Himmlers Befehl, die Vergasung der Juden zu stoppen,” Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1997, 258f.; www.vho.org/VffG/1997/4/HolHim4.html.
[←177] Nuit, 29: “Le samedi précédant la Pentecôte (Shavuot), sous un soleil printanier, les gens se promenaient insouciants à travers les rues grouillantes de monde. On bavardait gaîment.”
[←178] Ibid., 42: “Samedi, le jour du repos, était le jour choisi pour notre expulsion.”
[←179] Ibid., 69: “C’était une belle journée d’avril. Des parfums de printemps flottaient dans l’air. Le soleil baissait vers l’ouest.”
[←180]Elie Wiesel, Night, tr. Marion Wiesel (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 12.
[←181]Ibid., 40.
[←182]Die Nacht zu begraben, Elisha, tr. Kurt Meyer-Clason (Berlin: Ullstein, 1962).
[←183] See the comparison of the three language editions (French, English, German) by Jürgen Graf in: Robert Faurisson, “Witnesses to the Gas Chambers of Auschwitz,” in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of “Truth” and “Memory,” (Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2019), 139.
[←184]Saint Cheron, Elie Wiesel, 16: “[…] que l’on appela longtemps Lazar jusqu’à la fin des années 1940 […]”
[←185] Wiesel, La Nuit, 72: “Les trois ‘anciens,’ des aiguilles à la main, nous gravaient un numéro sur le bras gauche. Je devins A-7713. Je n’eus plus désormais d’autre nom.”
[←186] As mentioned in my Introduction, there exists a website devoted to the question of Wiesel’s tattoo and identity: www.eliewieseltattoo.com.
Warren B. Routledge:
Elie Wiesel, Saint of the Holocaust: A Critical Biography
Uckfield, East Sussex: Castle Hill Publishers
PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
[←187]Jean Robin, “Elie Wiesel n’a pas le tatouage qu’il prétend avoir.” Enquête et Débat, December 24, 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.enquete-debat.fr:80/archives/elie-wiesel-na-pas-le-tatouage-dauschwitz-quil-pretend-avoir-94416/; www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xw5uoe. Robin presents the texts of an email exchange he engaged in with Wojciech Płosa, the head of archives at Auschwitz. In the exchange, the latter confirmed the truth of Mattogno’s reading of the Grüner and Wiesel ID cards.
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