Silence

Silence Vs. Voice

A key aspect to communication and life in a society is one's ability to voice their thoughts and silence themselves at their own will. Accordingly, Elie Wiesel’s Night and Tatiana De Rosnay Sarah’s Key share a theme treating the issue of silence versus voice in Holocaust patients. Both novels reveal how the Holocaust forced people to go through hard situations, without being able to say anything about it, only select few individuals had a say in what happened. Situations involving a victim and perpetrator are imbedded within Night and Sarah’s Key to highlight the effects the Holocaust had on those living at the time, and how that changed their personalities.

Firstly, Night’s protagonist and author, Elie, helplessly watched his father get beat up and did not do anything about it when he could have. Elie himself writes, “Then as if waking from a deep sleep he slapped my father with such force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours. I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent." (Wiesel 39). Elies soundlessness shows how the Holocaust and concentration camp experience was really changing him: his past self would have stood up for his father, however his newfound fear of authority from his new life silenced him. The pressures and new atmosphere of the concentration camps got to Elie and in essence took his voice from him.

Moreover, in Sarah’s Key silence and voice is challenged when one of the two protagonists, Julia, decodes a secret she did not mean to. The novel reads, “finally, the lock clicked and she tugged the secret door open. A rotten stench hit her like a fist. She drew away. The boy at her side recoiled, afraid. Sarah fell to her knees. Sarah could not speak, she could only quiver, her fingers covering her eyes, her nose blocking out the smell….. she sank to her knees again and she...