Bring out yer dead!

Dialectic Journal #3 for Night, by Elie Wiesel


"'Throw out all the dead! All corpses outside!' The living rejoiced. The would be more room. Volunteers set to work. They felt those who were still crouching. 'Here's one! Take him!' They undressed him, the survivors avidly sharing out his clothes then two 'gravediggers' took him, one by the head and one by the feet, and threw him out of the wagon like a sack of flour."

I don't believe it! This is even worse than Monty Python's Holy Grail! There's one scene in that movie when everyone brings out the people who died overnight, and then there was a guy who didn't want to let his father go. But in this book, people were rejoicing that the dead were being thrown out of the train! They seriously didn't have anything, not even space to move or air to breathe! They were so deprived of everything that they were happy people were dying, because it means more space and more clothing to warm up from the snow. And they were on that train for three days! In the end, out of 100 people on Wiesel's wagon, only twelve survived. I don't believe that the SS can let people die so easily and not even show any compassion. This is as dark as it gets. But if we never contemplate what happened during the Holocaust, we wouldn't ever care about the duality of the world.