Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Stayin’ Alive

by Jimmy Hopper

The Riverwood Book Group will finish at our meeting tonight our discussions on two very fascinating books about persecution. They are Night by Elie Wiesel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Night is a memoir by Mr. Wiesel of the 15th and 16th years of his life; years spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The book is, of course, shocking in the extreme; and a great deal of the shock comes from the effect of treating the prisoners as if they were sub-human and totally without human characteristics. For example, we see the young narrator and his family disembark from the train that brought them to Auschwitz in cattle cars. After entering the gate, the son and his father are sent to the right while the wife and mother and young daughter are sent to the left. The males are going to the work camp barracks. The females are going directly to the gas chamber and ovens. They are not given the time to say good-by to wife, mother, sister and daughter. They simply never see them again.

In the savagery of their imprisonment, they soon become almost sub-human; becoming the way they are perceived by their captors. Everything is subjugated to survival. Family ties, religion, a sense of community, even the basic human aspects of goodness, kindness and sympathy disappear before that urge. It is startling to read and especially startling is the giving up of everything human for the type of life they are facing.

Solzhennitsyn’s book is a novel but is based on first hand knowledge since he was imprisoned by Stalin for eight years in the Gulag labor prisons. Their life also is one of basic survival; getting enough to eat and keeping warm enough to stay alive in the Siberian winter in which they live and work. Being able to do this is not a given, either. While they are fed and clothed, it is not enough and they have to work at it to get food and stay warm enough to maintain life.

A major difference exists, however, in their response. The hunger, cold, beatings, and mistreatment doesn’t drive them to the same sub-human depths outlined in the Nazi camps because they are still considered to be human by their captors; lesser humans, but human all the same. Community, religion, and even some caring for each other; especially those with common ties, all exist in the camps. One of the things that they can maintain is even a pride in their work, forced though it may be.

Reading the two books in juxtaposition was fascinating. Given the hard wired impulse to survive, what could cause a man who wants to live to freely give up his life? Soldiers give up their life for their comrades. Men die seeking to protect wives and children. And men and women were (and still are all over the world today) willing to die because of the truth that God exists and has placed that knowledge in their heads and hearts. This propensity is also hard wired into man, made in the image of a God who was willing to die for him.