Night

p. vi

Francois Mauriac tells us what had drawn him to Wiesel: “The look, as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed; stumbling among the shameful corpses. For him Nietzsche”s cry expressed an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness, of comfort, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, has vanished forever, beneath the gaze of this child, in the smoke of a human Holocaust exacted by Race, the most voracious of all idols. And how many pious Jews have experienced this death! On that day, horrible even among those days of horror when the child watched the hanging (yes!) of another child, who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan: “Where is God? Where is He? Where can he be now?” and a voice within answered: “Where? He is here–he has been hanged here on these gallows.”