Hope, Despair and Memory

“Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living.”

Wiesel describes what forgetting the past feels like by using the metaphors of a jail and a grave. Both of these metaphors suggest that the lack of a past hinders humanity’s freedom. They also compare forgetting the past as something akin to losing life itself. Wiesel echoes this dismal portrait later when describing the Holocaust as a present without a past.

“Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.”

Wiesel considers dreams and hope a necessity for life. This dichotomy illustrates Wiesel’s conception of time, in which the future depends on the past just as the hope of a better world depends on memories of past suffering. The passage thus lays the groundwork for The Alliance of Hope and Memory to Avoid Despair.

“He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.”

Wiesel remembers himself in the third person, highlighting the trauma of life in the concentration camps; in some ways, it is as though he died there. After the Holocaust, he and other survivors adopted memory as a tool, which connects to the principal theme that memory allows one to hope for a better future.