Hi friends,
I finished the book Night by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel this week. The memoir was a poignant account of his experience during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s.
Like most Holocaust survivors, Wiesel faced extreme hunger, sickness, and cruelty. He saw his dad beaten and starved to death.
The most profound impression I had from the book was the first night when Wiesel arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was shocked by how many men, women, and children were sent to the crematorium and burned alive.
He refused to accept what was happening. He wrote:
I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake?… All this could not be real. Soon, I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that I was back in the room of my childhood with my books.
In the same chapter, Wiesel wrote the most striking paragraph:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never. (emphasis is mine)
I wondered why I chose to read another Holocaust book. Stories like this aren’t pleasurable reads, but I think they help me make sense of the difficulties in my life—not to negate them, but to put them in perspective.
When I was younger, I had a naive understanding that if I could remove pain and discomfort, I would be happy. But as I age, I realize this thinking is flawed in two ways.
First, it’s impossible to eliminate all pains. Regardless of our current circumstances, life can go wrong when we least expect it and in ways we can’t imagine. No amount of contingency planning or material abundance can prevent that.
Second, the absence of unhappiness is not the same as the presence of happiness. It took me years to understand this idea, but seeing difficult moments through this lens has been helpful. A lack of problems is not the same as happiness; a painless existence doesn’t guarantee joy.
Happiness and sadness aren’t mutually exclusive. Instead, the two can—and often, must—coexist. This means we can be happy amid difficulties.
From this perspective, happiness is a choice we must make repeatedly: Will I choose to be happy with what I have now even though the circumstance is not what I wanted?
This question is the hardest to answer when we face tremendous difficulties. When I read Wiesel’s traumatic narrative, I thought, “Give this guy a break already!” How is it possible for someone like him to be happy ever again?
As these thoughts swirled, I came across another passage from the Book of Joy. South African archbishop Desmond Tutu said:
Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak.
In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive.
Yet, as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters.
We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.