Eric McCambridge
ENG 360
Paper #1
September 30, 2014

The Differing Modes of Writing Used to Describe Winter in Night and None of Us Will Return

The onset of winter was a particularly troubling time for prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. Prisoners were offered few pieces of clothing and, coupled with the fact that they were often working outside, were subject to the harsh and unforgiving conditions of winter. Because of their poor protection from the cold, it was during winter that the most prisoners perished. Elie Wiesel and Charlotte Delbo, both survivors of the concentration camps, describe their lives within the concentration camps during the winter season in their books, Night and None of Us Will Return, respectively. Though they are both describing the same season and similar living conditions, their written accounts of the winter months differ greatly. When recounting his evacuation from Buna in the winter of 1944, Wiesel takes a decidedly more reportorial approach to his story. Delbo, on the other hand, focuses more on reflection when writing about the same winter in Auschwitz. While both are writing about the same period of time in relatively the same area in Europe, each author manages to evoke different emotions from the reader when describing their personal experience with winter. During the winter of 1944 in Auschwitz, Charlotte Delbo is clinging to life. She is malnourished and exhausted, yet she still finds beauty in her surroundings and relays it to the reader through the lens of an artist. As she stands outside in the freezing temperatures, she contemplates freezing and recounts a haunting and beautiful description of how she views her current state. "The snow sparkles in the refracted light. There are no beams, light, hard and glacial, where everything is etched in sharp outline . … One thinks of plants caught in ice. … We are frozen in a block of hard, cutting ice, transparent like a block of pure crystal. … It takes a long time to be able to realize we are able to move within the block of ice that encloses us. We wiggle out toes within our shoes, stamp our feet. Fifteen thousand women stamp their feet yet no noise is heard. The silence is solidified into cold. We are in a place where time is abolished. We do not know whether we exist, only ice, light, dazzling snow, and us, in this ice, this light, this silence," (32) She not only tells the reader she is freezing, she convinces the reader to freeze a little with her, convinces that there is something here for us. In Delbo's hands, these events shape the history of the camp into more than remembering. She forces us to know by creating and leaving with us images that are at the same time, horrible in content and beautiful in poetic construction. Delbo’s account of winter embodies the reflective mode of writing. She utilizes the metaphor of the freezing Arctic to show her own feelings toward freezing. Though she is suffering, she still manages to see the beauty in winter and the snow falling all around her. Not far from Delbo in Auschwitz, Wiesel is fighting a similar battle with winter in the Buna factory. Fearing he will be executed if he stays, his father and him decide to evacuate with the other prisoners to the nearby Gleiwitz. Wiesel goes on to depict the grueling odyssey through the snow and subzero temperatures the prisoners must make. All the prisoners are forced to run the distance to Gleiwitz, most without shoes or other proper protection from the cold. Though his foot is injured, he manages to run the entire distance with his father in tow. Where Weisel’s account differs from Delbo’s is in the reportorial style it is told. Wiesel does not go into much reflective detail about the events. Rather, he simply narrates what transpires. It is interesting to note, however, the parallel he draws between his connection with his father and the relationship between Rabbi Eliahou and his own son. Wiesel and his father work together to survive the run and rely on each other throughout the book to ensure they survive their imprisonment. Eliahou’s own son, however, abandons Eliahou during the transport. Fearing his father would not survive the trek and not wanting to be dragged down by him, Eliahou’s son runs ahead of him, effectively losing him in the shuffle of bodies. Wiesel also flashes forward at one point in this same section as he recounts the German citizens throwing hunks of bread and watching the starving prisoners kill each other over them. His account of a similar event with a Parisian woman throwing coins to poor children in Yemen and watching two boys kill each other over one coin further exemplifies the reportorial style of Wiesel’s writing in this section, which in turn strongly differs with Delbo’s more reflective and meditative style when describing the same subject. Wiesel does not attempt to invoke emotion through descriptive writing. Instead he allows the sheer horror of the events to invoke emotion in the reader. Though Wiesel and Delbo are writing about similar events in similar locations in roughly the same time period, both authors succeed in evoking different emotions from the reader. Delbo’s poetic and metaphorical reflection, while still showing the horror and dismay felt by the prisoners, illustrates how Delbo was still able to retain her sanity and see the beauty of the changing seasons, even though it meant certain death for many of her fellow prisoners. Though the reader can see similarity in the way each other relies on others for survival, Wiesel with his father and Delbo with her fellow prisoners, the similarities end there. Wiesel report of his transport relies on the sheer gravity of his situation as well as a few flashbacks to evoke horror and sadness from the reader.