Elie Wiesel: When a man becomes a number

How does a person still believe in God in the wake of such terrible tragedies in the world such as the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti, the dwelling drought in Kenya, the awful oil spill in the Gulf, and the ongoing wars fought in the Middle East? However, one event outweighs all the events listed above; the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a symbol of evil that has been around since the 1940s and generations for all time will always be stunned by what humanity produced and executed during those sad years in Germany. The world remained blind to evil in the eyes of many Jews, including the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize writer Elie Wiesel, whose work has influenced thousands worldwide. Some Holocaust survivors reject God altogether, including theologian Richard Rubenstein. For Rubenstein the Holocaust murdered his faith and God. Yet, Wiesel sits on the other side of the fence and proclaims that God is not dead.
Wiesel, shown through his words and works, remains faithful in his belief in God’s existence in the world; despite the unexplained pain he felt in the Holocaust, and the apparent evil he continues to witness, because of God’s presence through good people in his life.

Wiesel, like many Jews, grew up a boy of the Torah. Raised in a strong Jewish household, Wiesel learned to love God and God’s law. Yet, when he was 15 the S.S. came to his house and stripped him of all he knew and loved. He arrived in Auschwitz with his father by his side and they clung together until his father’s cruel death. Together they witnessed horrible sights such as flames engulfing children, men straggled by ropes, men being shot repeatedly, men wrestling over bread crumbs, and men committing suicide by throwing themselves on barb wire fences.
Yet, Wiesel did not reject God completely in any of his early days. In a gut wrenching memory Elie describes the beating that would lead to his father’s eventually death. Wiesel’s father was crying out to his son and Elie describes his angry at his father for not remaining silent in the presence of the S.S. guards, who created a bloody laceration on the old man’s head due to his disobedience. Elie could only remain upset and speechless as he observed the scene numbly. Those dreadful days in the death camp would become a problem for Wiesel’s theology, along with the rest of the world, and his life as he once knew it was over before he would celebrate his six-teeth birthday. For the next year Elie Wiesel was simply A-7713 a number that was tattooed on his forearm and he would remain a number for the next few months. His name was gone and his life forever changed.