18 pages • 36 minutes read
Elie WieselNever Shall I Forget
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Trauma and Indelible Memories
The phrase that Wiesel repeats—“Never shall I forget”—establishes the poem's central theme, trauma and indelible memories. Surviving the Holocaust qualifies as an extreme trauma. That is, the Holocaust was a shocking, distressing ordeal, and people don’t tend to forget extremely agonizing experiences. As the contemporary author, speaker, and trauma survivor Samra Zafar states in “The Various Faces of Trauma,” “We don’t move on from trauma. We move on with it” (Harvard Medical School Primary Care Review, 1 July 2022). Wiesel can’t move on from the Holocaust. He can’t let go of the macabre images that sealed themselves in his brain forever.
In the poem, Wiesel expresses a wish to die and abandon hope, but his life and work indicate that he learned how to move on with his trauma. By sharing his traumatic memories with the world, he bears witness in the hopes that people in the future won’t have to experience similar traumas. They won’t have to see people murder “the small faces of children” (Line 4) or contend with “a silent sky” (Line 5) or an apathetic world. As Wiesel says in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize speech, “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe” (“Elie Wiesel: Acceptance Speech.” The Nobel Prize, 1986).
The theme connects to the abundance of contemporary Holocaust discourse. Anita Lobel writes about how she survived the Holocaust as a young person in her memoir, No Pretty Pictures, noting, “There are documentaries and debates and memorials and countless heartbreaking accounts of what happened during the years of terror and hunger and humiliation” (Lobel, Anita. No Pretty Pictures. Greenwillow, 1998, p. 188). The number of cultural products about the Holocaust suggests that the trauma and memories of the Holocaust will live on and not be forgotten—they have a central place in Western culture.
In Whites, Jews, and Us (2016), the French Algerian scholar and activist Houria Bouteldja argues that the emphasis on remembering the trauma of the Holocaust is racial. As the Holocaust happened to Jews and other white Europeans, according to Bouteldja, Western culture elevates it above other tragedies. By drawing attention to other mass murders and violence throughout his lifetime, including the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, Wiesel subverts such arguments:
I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands…But there are others as important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism (“Elie Wiesel: Acceptance Speech.” The Nobel Prize, 1986).
Death and Inhumanity
Trauma and indelible memories link to the theme of death and inhumanity, as the barbarity of the concentration camps creates visceral distress and “those things” (Line 11) that Wiesel will always remember. In the poem, death and inhumanity aren’t explicit, so the theme relies on the reader having some knowledge of the historical context. The “smoke” (Lines 3, 5) and the “flames” (Line 6) allude to the burning of people killed in the gas chambers. To reinforce the inhumanity, Wiesel creates an image that spotlights the murder of children, with the implication being that the Nazis didn’t only kill adults but innocent children. As children couldn’t supply hard labor, Nazis often selected them for the gas chamber right away.
In Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz (1946), Olga Lengyel discusses helping prisoners give birth and then pinching the nostrils of newborns in order to give them a more humane death than they would receive in the gas chamber. Wiesel doesn’t detail such death and inhumanity, but through allusion and unsettling imagery, he builds the theme. By putting the onus on the reader to make connections, Wiesel arguably makes death and inhumanity more personal and impactful.
The theme also functions figuratively, with Wiesel mourning his own death and inhumanity. Wiesel didn’t literally die, but the overwhelming brutality has eradicated the elements that make him human. As Wiesel states, “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and / turned my dreams to ashes” (Lines 9-10). Tangible bodies die, but so do immaterial things like dreams, souls, and God.
Silence and Helplessness
The initial title for Night was And the World Remained Silent, and Wiesel ties the theme of silence and helplessness into the poem taken from Night. The world didn’t care about Wiesel or the other victims of the Nazis’ systematic murders. Wiesel’s life in the camp was “one long / night seven times seven sealed” (Lines 1-2). He and the prisoners were cut off from the civilized world, and vice versa, and they faced “a silent sky” (Line 5) and “the nocturnal silence” (Line 7), believing no one was coming to help them or taking action to disrupt the genocidal program. The world had nothing to say about Wiesel, nothing that he could hear in the silence, and they weren’t doing anything to save him.
The muted response represents the world’s lack of concern, and it left Wiesel helpless. The situation was so dehumanizing and hopeless that Wiesel and the other prisoners were unable even to save themselves. His God, soul, and dreams are now gone, and so is his “desire to live” (Line 8). The silence indicates that Wiesel’s life and the lives of the millions of others trapped in the camps didn’t matter. If they had value, people would have talked about them and tried to save them. Borrowing from Wiesel’s Nobel Prize speech, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere” (“Elie Wiesel: Acceptance Speech.” The Nobel Prize, 1986). Yet there was no one to interfere with the smoke and flames, and the imputed indifference gives Wiesel a dramatic sense of loss.
Unlike the sky and night, Wiesel won’t be silent. By sharing his memories, he restores his agency and counters the silence. By writing the poem, he provides the sympathy and help to those who suffered that the world denied them at the time.
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