Carolyn Yeager has put up a new article on her web site www.eliewieseltatto.com which addresses the issue of Elie Wiesel’s description of the Buchenwald concentration camp in his book “Night.” You can read the full article here.
Ms. Yeager does not believe that Elie Wiesel was ever an inmate at Buchenwald. One would think that a highly acclaimed writer like Elie Wiesel would have painted vivid word pictures of the Buchenwald camp. But that is not the case, as Ms. Yeager points out. She has come to the conclusion that he was not at Buchenwald because he did not describe the camp at all.
This quote is from http://www.eliewieseltatto.com:
I have to say Wiesel doesn’t describe Buchenwald at all. You don’t know anything about Buchenwald from reading Night. You don’t learn much about Eliezer or anyone else. You are given an impression of suffering, without rhyme or reason, so Buchenwald becomes synonymous with suffering, that’s about it. We don’t know what it looks like.
In the few pages in which Wiesel described his suffering at Buchenwald, he tripped up twice. The first time was when he wrote “Then I came to a block where they were distributing black coffee.” (more…)
