Dawn by Elie Wiesel Review

WW2 has ended, the state of Israel is yet to be founded. In the years between these two events, a teenage Holocaust survivor, Elisha, is recruited into a Zionist terror cell to fight for an independent Jewish state in Palestine against the hated occupiers, the British. When one of their own is captured and sentenced to death, they capture a British officer in retaliation and propose a hostage exchange. If their comrade is executed at dawn, then so will the British officer - and Elisha will be the one to pull the trigger. Can Elisha reconcile going from being a victim of the Nazis to suddenly finding himself in the same position as they were - and will he go through with the killing?

When I read Night, Elie Wiesel’s haunting and powerful memoir of being a child prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Holocaust, I didn’t realise it was part of a trilogy until recently. So I picked up the other two books that form the trilogy - Dawn and The Accident (later retitled “Day” to fit the theme of the trilogy’s titles) - and, after beginning Dawn, immediately had to look up what Wiesel was doing post-WW2. Did he become a terrorist?! No - this is an unusual trilogy in that the first book is a memoir and the other two are works of fiction.

(Apparently Wiesel did try to join the Zionist underground movement right after WW2 but was unsuccessful; instead he went to university, got a job as a journalist and remained a professional writer for the rest of his life.)

I wasn’t as taken with Dawn as I was Night but there’s certainly aspects of Dawn to recommend it. The premise is a very compelling one and drew me in effortlessly and swiftly. It’s well-written - the prose is clear and accessible. In lieu of a plot-driven narrative, Wiesel instead tries to get into the head of someone who had gone through what he had would think and feel like in such an extreme position as Elisha finds himself in. That is, finding himself in another conflict only this time in the role of the jailer instead of the prisoner.

And it’s how Elisha wrestles with the moral and spiritual conflict he finds himself in - speaking to his dead relatives’ ghosts from the Holocaust, as well as the kid he once was - that connects Dawn to Night, not just in continuing the story of Elisha but seeing the formation of what would become Israel in direct response to the Holocaust.

The most striking feature of Dawn is how similar the conflict in the book is to the present day’s, albeit with the grim irony of the Jews being in the role of the British now and Hamas in the role of Elisha and his crew in this story. It’s sad that this area remains in a state of perpetual conflict no matter the era - the sides may change but the fighting never ends in the “holy land”.

I wonder if too, the reasoning that runs through Elisha’s head to try and justify his murder of the British officer John Dawson are the same reasons Israelis today use to justify what they’re doing in Gaza today - or is it worse and they’re not even capable of the same depth of moral turmoil that Elisha goes through, especially given how much more powerful they are in comparison to the Palestinians? Either way, reading Dawn gave me an idea of some of the pro-Israeli reasons for behaving as ruthlessly as the Nazis and made their case for justice - and any semblance for peace in that region - seem all the more hopeless as a result.

Dawn isn’t as moving as Night - Night shakes the soul while Dawn is more of a cerebral thought experiment. And one that doesn’t quite satisfy, either as an exciting story - the story reaches its inevitable and underwhelming conclusion at a pedestrian pace - or as an especially enlightening exploration of morality in wartime. People will tell themselves what they need to to go through what they have to - right or wrong be damned, even if it damns them too.

The premise of Dawn is more exciting than its (pardon the pun) execution and, though it’s connected to Night, it’s also nowhere near as remarkable a book. Not a bad read though and a depressing reminder of the repetition of history.