To be supreme is to be human. It is to understand that you walk on two feet rather on all four. It is to rise above the muddled cacophony of the rush hour whether it be in your slowly moving car going nowhere or crammed in the confines of the airtight vacuum called MRT and say “I deserve more, people deserve more.” People deserve the right not to be sardines squished everyday in an MRT car sharing a landmine of germs from sweat and other fluids too graphic to mention. People deserve the right to see and enjoy the sun and not only on their day off. In short, life is about more than letting outside forces such as in-duh-viduals or the almighty dollar make you less human than you ought to be.
Yet it is easy to forget that we are human when society tries to devolve us by extolling vices rather than such as the “emo” kids who believe that being human is to self-implode through daily doses of depression. Of course, this fight to be supreme, to be human, has always been going on. Within the past century, we had the explosion of the atomic bomb in the heavily populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, but this has already been reduced to spectacle, as you talk to fourth grade kids today and try to explain how, once upon a time, entire urban centers were, in fact, leveled to dust. Their response is, “Yeah, right, and maybe it would be more interesting if what you said was turned into a PS3 game.”
Into The Kingdom Of Night
This is perhaps why the autobiographical holocaust experience of Jewish writer Elie Wiesel, Night, is such an important piece of literature that he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. It is because Wiesel reminds us that even under such dire circumstances we still need to have hope, an essential characteristic of being human. Wiesel does more than just recount historical events. His facts plumb the depths of the desperation that occur in the concentration camp of Auschwitz II Birkenau, balanced by the moral example of his father, who is his sole reason for surviving and keeping his humanity. This is because the father’s stern presence keeps him from stealing bread from other hungry prisoners or reducing himself to the mad wolf pack seen in National Geographic specials. Hence, by virtue of being human, of being supreme, he decides to preserve himself to continue looking after his father.
Night is more than a series of events but rather a building emotion of darkness enveloped under piles and piles of dead bodies — hence the book’s title. This is seen in Wiesel’s questioning of his own Jewish faith as he is crammed into a boxcar with 100 passengers, who through starvation is quickly whittled down to 12.
Admittedly, Night is not a sunny-day read, for its conclusion is abrupt and has no sense of closure (his father dies from dysentery). Yet its worth is proven by its mere existence, as Wiesel explains in an epilogue on why he wrote the book: “To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” He adds, “Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”
Into The Kingdom Of Hope
As much as Wiesel wants us to remember the suffering of the Jews so that it may not happen elsewhere, I think the importance of the Holocaust is to remind us of the human ability to hope and how it can make us supreme. Elie Wiesel survived the camps because of hope in his father; he did not succumb to the Nazi’s efforts to dehumanize him in various ways, such as forcing him to sleep with rotting corpses or even abandon his father. Another biographical holocaust story told in graphic novel form called Maus (Mouse) has its protagonist Vladek Spiegelman surviving the war through hope in his wife Anja and curiously through his prison No. 175113, which adds up to 18, meaning the word “life” in Jewish tradition.
With these graphic experiences in mind, whether it be in an MRT ride heading to work or a boxcar going to a concentration camp crammed with people barely alive, we have to realize that we cannot let circumstances make us less than human. We have to live upright lives, walking on our own two feet, giving way to people when we can and trying to understand others rather than biting people’s heads off like lions. We are more than that. We have a brain to work things out. We have a heart designed for hope. For that reason, let us be human. For to be human is to be supreme.
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Night by Elie Wiesel is available at National Bookstore. Learn about the author at http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/
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Share your supremely human thoughts at http://readnow.i.ph.