Dawn
Elie Wiesel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
“No…we are not murderers. Your Cabinet ministers are murderers; they are responsible for the death of your son. We should have preferred to receive him as a brother.”
Sounding strikingly like a modern-day suicide martyr video, these words are actually the radioed “Voice of Freedom” of the Jewish resistance against the British in late-1940’s Palestine, as captured in Elie Wiesel’s Dawn. The slim volume is the second in the re-released Night trilogy, and is a powerful follow-up to the author’s memoir of surviving Auschwitz. In addition to being a powerful, historical story, it ultimately begs confrontation with the Palestine of present day.
Dawn portrays the last ten hours of the childhood of Elisha, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the death camps. Since surviving, he has joined the Jewish resistance in British-ruled Palestine and is charged with an assignment of an unsettling sort: an execution. A Jewish terrorist has been sentenced to death at dawn and Elisha’s commander has ordered a British officer kidnapped and executed in retaliation.
Walking through memories of the death camps, tracing the death not only of his father and mother but of God as well, Elisha encounters the specters of his family who gather to witness the bitter moment when victim becomes aggressor. He watches the execution hour encroach mercilessly closer, at once resisting the passing of time and begging its passage. In these passing hours, he shores himself with justifications: Should mankind take up justice in the absence of God? Will dehumanization of his victim assuage his guilt? Neither exploration with grief, love, pity, nor even hate enable Elisha to dispel the inner death following the gunshot at the crack of dawn.
The moral impasses that Wiesel’s haunting prose brings us through beg us to reconsider the declaration of Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and then prime minister of Israel (1983 – 1984), that “neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.” Following on the heels of Night, the re-release of Dawn invites us to consider Shamir’s statement, and asks whether Jewish ethics, having passed through a period of moral night, where persecution permitted retaliation, will travel with us into a new dawn.
