Another very meditative short novel to complete the trilogy. This one ponders the question:
Having survived the cruelest of wars, how does one go on in a hostile or indifferent world?
When you have lost everything except memory, how can you count on the future or become attached to another person? Wiesel has written that God died in the camps for him, and it shows in the self-reflection here.
Once I asked my teacher, Kalman the cabalist, the following question: For what purpose did God create man? I understand that man needs God. But what need of man has God?
Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul—and worse, the souls of your friends—for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep. Saints are those who die before the end of the story. The others, those who live out their destiny, no longer dare look at themselves in the mirror, afraid they may see their inner image: a monster laughing at unhappy women and at saints who are dead…
The problem is not: to be or not to be. But rather: to be and not to be. What it comes down to is that man lives while dying, that he represents death to the living, and that’s where tragedy begins.
Our stay there planted time bombs within us. From time to time one of them explodes. And then we are nothing but suffering, shame, and guilt. We feel ashamed and guilty to be alive, to eat as much bread as we want, to wear good, warm socks in the winter. One of these bombs, Kathleen, will undoubtedly bring about madness. It’s inevitable. Anyone who has been there has brought back some of humanity’s madness. One day or another, it will come to the surface.
3 stars
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