Never Shall I Forget

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1958

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context: The Holocaust and World War II

Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust—a Greek word that means “burnt offering” or sacrifice. The Holocaust refers to the multiple genocides spanning from 1933 to 1945 that were enacted by Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Aside from systematically murdering around six million Jewish people, the Nazis killed five million other people from targeted groups, including Roma, political opponents, and people with mental and physical conditions.

To expedite the killings, the Nazis used gas chambers that could be filled with poisonous or asphyxiant fumes. The first group they put in the gas chambers were people with mental and physical conditions. The Nazis then installed gas chambers in the concentration camps, areas where the mass imprisonment and forced labor of Jewish people and other targeted groups took place. Auschwitz, the biggest concentration camp, had multiple gas chambers, and the “smoke” (Lines 3, 5) that Wiesel witnesses in the poem comes from burning the gas chamber victims’ bodies in crematoriums. Though Wiesel’s two older sisters survived, his mother and younger sister were both killed in the gas chambers.

The concentration camps were brutal. As Wiesel’s father tells him in Night, “Humanity is not concerned with us. Today, anything is allowed” (Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Stella Rodway, Bantam Books, 1986, p. 30). Aside from the gas chambers, prisoners could die for numerous reasons—malnutrition, disease, assault, or arbitrary execution. The prisoners were always a moment away from death, and, in the poem, Wiesel states that he can never forget the constant life-or-death trauma.

The genocide Wiesel survived isn’t separate from World War II. Through propaganda and spectacle, Hitler won fair elections in Germany and pulled the Nazi party into power. They turned democratic Germany into a totalitarian state, where Hitler had almost total control. In 1939, he invaded Poland, launching World War II. Soon, the Nazis occupied much of mainland Europe. Their goal was to dominate the world and turn Germany into an unmatched empire. Hitler aimed to create a superior group of humans—“Aryans”—to populate the new world order, and Jewish people like Wiesel did not fit into that conception.

When Wiesel entered Auschwitz in 1944, Hitler’s overextended and mismanaged armies were retreating. In May 1945, around a month after Americans liberated Wiesel at Buchenwald, the Allies declared victory in Europe. Nazi Germany lost the war, and Wiesel survived. As the poem explicitly communicates, however, he would always remember the history he witnessed.

Authorial Context: Elie Wiesel and Night

“Never Shall I Forget” comes from Wiesel’s book Night. In the book, the lines appear in paragraph form, or prose. They appear shortly after Wiesel and his family enter Auschwitz, when Wiesel realizes the deadly horrors that await him. In the book, Lines 1-5 comprise the first paragraph, Line 6 forms a one-sentence paragraph, and Lines 7-13 make up the third paragraph. By turning the excerpt into a poem, Wiesel draws attention to the dramatic words and gives readers another way to talk and learn about the Holocaust.

During his life, Wiesel presented Night as autobiographical memoir, his testimony of the events of the Holocaust. Some scholars, however, suggest that certain conversations, details, and even events depicted in Night were exaggerated for literary effect. In a later memoir titled All Rivers Run to the Sea (1994), Wiesel himself suggests that some of the events in Night may have been embellished: When asked by the Rebbe of Vizhnitz about the veracity of his work, Wiesel states, “In literature, Rebbe, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not, even if they did” (Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1995, p. 275). There is no doubt, however, about Wiesel’s survival of the Holocaust. He outlived the genocide, and Night is his account. He is the voice of the book and the poem. They are not a product of a nameless speaker but of Wiesel: These are his emotions and memories. In Night, an Auschwitz prisoner declares, “Let the world learn of the existence of Auschwitz. Let everybody hear about it” (29). As the author of the poem and the book, Wiesel tells the world what happened.