Thursday, November 29, 2001

i finished reading 'the night trilogy' by elie wiesel a little while ago. an hour or so. i don't know why they made it a triology... it's three books, yes, but the first 'night' is a biography and hte other two 'dawn' and 'the accident' are fiction.. I THINK. god i am so confused. if 'the accident' is fiction, then the character has the same name as the author. it's quite quite confusing. but anyway 'night' is about the holocaust. and then the other two are like post. and really theyre all mainly about death. i really liked them though.
ok this is what i found to be the saddest part of the whole damned book. i'm sure it wont seem as sad now, without having read everything before it, but it was the only part that made me teary-eyed. the main character (eliezer) and his father have just been taken to Gleiwitz which is this concentration camp and theyre shoved into these barracks (to go to sleep) and it's so crowded that they have to walk on people and no one's screaming or making noise or anything and people are walking on them and it's awful and there's no room to breathe and things. ehh i think there might be more to this passage than i thought. uhm. anyway....
"My father and I were thrown to the ground by this rolling tide. Beneath our feet someone let out a rattling cry: 'You're crushing me... mercy!' A voice that was not unknown to me
'You're crushing me... mercy! mercy!' The same faint voice, the same rattle, heard somewhere before. That voice had spoken to me one day. Where? When? Years ago? No, it could only have been at the camp.
'Mercy!' I felt that I was crushing him. I was stopping his breath. I wanted to get up. I struggled to disengage myself, so that he could breathe. But I was crushed myself beneath the weight of other bodies. I could hardly breathe. I dug my nails into unknown faces. I was biting all round me, in order to get air. No one cried out.
Suddenly I remembered. Juliek! The boy from Warsaw who played the violin in the band at Buna...
'Juliek, is it you?'
'Eliezer... the twenty-five strokes of the whip. Yes... I remember.' [elie got beaten at buna] He was silent. A long moment elapsed.
'Juliek! Can you hear me, Juliek?'
'Yes...' he said in a feeble voice. 'What do you want?'
He was not dead.
'How do you feel, Juliek?' I asked, less to know the answer than to hear that he could speak, that he was alive.
'All right, Eliezer... I'm getting on all right... hardly any air... worn out. My feet are swollen. It's good to rest, but my violin..." I thought he had gone out of his mind. What use was the violin here?
'What, your violin?' He gasped.
'I'm afraid... I'm afraid... that they'll break my violin... I've brought it with me.' I could not answer him. Someone was lying full length on top of me, covering my face. I was unable to breathe, through either mouth or nose. Sweat beaded my brow, ran down my spine. This was the end––the end of the road. A silent death, suffocation. No way of crying out, of calling for help.
I tried to get rid of my invisible assassin. My whole will to live was centered on my nails. I scratched. I battled for a mouthful of air. I tore at decaying flesh which did not respond. I could not free myself from this wass weighing down my chest. Was it a dead man I was struggling against? Who knows?
I shall never know. All I can say is that I won. I succeeded in digging a hole through this wall of dying people, a little hole through which I could drink in a small quantity of air.
'Father, how are you?' I asked, as soon as I could utter a word. I knew he could not be that far from me.
'Well!' answered a distant voice, which seeemed to come from another world. I tried to sleep. He tried to sleep. Was he right or wrong? Could one sleep here? Was it not dangerous to allow your vigilance to fail, even for a moment, when at any moment, when at any minute death could pounce upon you?
I was thinking of this when I heard the sound of a violin. The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on the living. What madman could be playing the violin here, at the brink of his own grave? Or was it really an hallucination?
It must have been Juliek.
He played a fragment from Beethoven's concerto. I had never heard sounds so pure. In such a silence.
How had he managed to free himself? To draw his body from under mine without my being aware of it?
It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as thought Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings–– his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again.
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget that concert, given to an audience of dying and dead men! To this day, whenever I hear Beethoven played my eyes close and out of the dark rises the sad, pale face of my Polish friend, as he said farewell on his violin to an audience of dying men.
I do not know for how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke, in the daylight, I could seek Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse."


i just don't know what i'm gonna do for my biography report (due monday) x_x... and i still havent turned in this project that was due an eternity ago because i keep forgetting about it when we get to class. as we are studying the odyssey in a very odd way and it consumes my entire attention, also as i am eating many cheesy popcorn bits.

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