Dawn

“Tomorrow, I said to myself, we shall be bound together by the tie that binds a victim and his executioner.”

This line highlights Elisha’s fatalistic outlook. Although he doesn’t want to kill Dawson, he’s already resolute that he must do it. His reflections on the metaphysical connection between killers and victims speaks to his fatalism and intimate association with death.

“‘You mustn’t be afraid of the dark,’ he said, gently grasping my arm and making me shudder. ‘Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he does not know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.’”

This passage is central to the themes and events of Dawn. The Beggar appraises humans’ tendency to withhold their thoughts and feelings by day, when they’re most visible. This echoes the discrepancy between Elisha’s thoughts and actions. At night, he agonizes over Dawson’s execution; at dawn, he clears his mind and dispassionately kills.

“Every evening since then I had made a point of standing near a window to witness the arrival of night. And every evening I saw a face outside. It was not always the same face, for no one night was like another. In the beginning I saw the face of the beggar. Then, after my father’s death, I saw his face, with the eyes grown large with death and memory. Sometimes total strangers lent the night their tearful face or forgotten smile. I knew nothing about them except that they were dead.”

This passage sets up a few key symbols and events that occur later in the book. Seeing the faces of the dead foreshadows the ghosts’ visit. Knowing that Elisha frequently looks out windows and sees the faces of the dead there helps contextualize why he’s horrified to see his own face there after killing Dawson.

“Hour after hour, Gad spoke to me of the blue nights of Palestine, of their calm and serene beauty. You walk out in the evening with a woman, you tell her that she is beautiful and you love her, and twenty centuries hear what you are saying. But for the English the night holds no beauty. For them, every night opens and shuts like a tomb. Every night, two, three, a dozen soldiers are swallowed up by the darkness and never seen again.”

Gad’s language around Palestine is devoutly Zionist. His rhetoric positions Palestine as the natural dwelling place for Jews and no one else. The night in Palestine isn’t just ancestral but uniquely welcoming to Jews. As Gad describes it, the land’s automatic rejection of interlopers like the English is just as natural.

“My parents had not been Zionists. To me Zion was a sacred ideal, a Messianic hope, a prayer, a heartbeat, but not a place on a map or a political slogan, a cause for which men killed and died.”

This quote illustrates the split between theoretical and political Zionism. While one reflects an idealized spiritual concept, the other represents the bloody and complicated reality brought about by pursuing it.

“No, Mrs. Dawson, we are not murderers. Your Cabinet ministers are murderers; they are responsible for the death of your son. We should have preferred to receive him as a brother, to offer him bread and milk and show him the beauties of our country. But your government made him our enemy and by the same token signed his death warrant. No, we are not murderers.”

Ilana’s description of the Movement as reluctant killers parallels Elisha’s own feelings about executing Dawson. In addition, Ilana’s moving speech introduces some of the rhetoric that Elisha later uses to justify his actions.

“‘On the day when the English understand that their occupation will cost them blood they won’t want to stay,’ Gad told us. ‘It’s cruel—inhuman, if you like. But we have no other choice. For generations we’ve wanted to be better than those who persecuted us. You’ve all seen the result: Hitler and the extermination camps in Germany. We’ve had enough of trying to be more just than those who claim to speak in the name of justice. When the Nazis killed a third of our people just men found nothing to say. If ever it’s a question of killing off Jews, everyone is silent; there are twenty centuries of history to prove it. We can rely only on ourselves. If we must become more unjust and inhuman than those who have been unjust and inhuman to us, then we shall do so.”

Gad passionately speaks to Elisha and the other new Movement volunteers in defense of Jewish violence against the English. He directly invokes the Nazis, whose genocidal campaign against Jews had ended no more than a year or two earlier. He frames his speech as an eloquent and convincing argument in favor of Jewish militarism that presents the Movement’s aggression as inherently defensive and retaliatory.

“In the days and weeks and months to come you will have only one purpose: to kill those who have made us killers. We shall kill in order that once more we may be men.”

This is another line from Gad’s speech. It presents killings by the Movement as oxymoronic. He frames political violence against the English as unavoidable. The only way to avoid being killers is to kill, thus wiping the Movement’s victims/aggressors out of existence. This line later echoes in Elisha’s thoughts as he prepares to kill Dawson (see quote 22).

“Why has a man no right to commit murder? Because in doing so he takes upon himself the function of God. And this must not be done too easily. Well, I said to myself, if in order to change the course of our history we have to become God, we shall become Him. How easy that is we shall see. No, it was not easy.”

Elisha characterizes undertaking political violence as simultaneously blasphemous and empowering. He presents ease as a double-entendre: When he notes that “this must not be done too easily,” he means that it shouldn’t be done thoughtlessly or without good reason. When he reiterates that “it was not easy,” he means that it was an extremely taxing action to take.

“They ran like rabbits, like drunken rabbits, looking for the shelter of a tree. They seemed to have neither heads nor hands, but only legs. And these legs ran like rabbits sotted with wine and sorrow.”

While watching English soldiers flee his attack, Elisha sees them not as people but as animals and a series of disembodied legs. He successfully dehumanizes his victims; however, doing so reminds him of the way the Nazis treated him and the other Jews in Buchenwald. This triggers intense self-loathing in him.

“I saw the legs running like frightened rabbits and I found myself utterly hateful. I remembered the dreaded SS guards in the Polish ghettos. Day after day, night after night, they slaughtered the Jews in just the same way. Tommy guns were scattered here and there, and an officer, laughing or distractedly eating, barked out the order: Fire! Then the scythe went to work. A few Jews tried to break through the circle of fire, but they only rammed their heads against its insurmountable wall. They too ran like rabbits, like little rabbits sotted with wine and sorrow.”

This passage recounts Elisha’s memories of Nazi violence; the narrative strongly implies that it’s a flashback brought on by participating in a paramilitary ambush. Wiesel repeats phrases and images from the paramilitary event, suggesting that the sight of running victims and tommy guns triggered the flashback.

“In the first operation and those that followed I was not alone. I killed, to be sure, but I was one of a group. With John Dawson I would be on my own. I would look into his face and he would look into mine and see that I was all eyes.”

Elisha thinks about one of the reasons that he views executing Dawson differently than his previous killings. Killing as part of a paramilitary squad allowed him a level of anonymity that won’t be available during a one-on-one execution. The motif of eyes and faces coalesce here, closely binding death and interpersonal identification in a way that doesn’t allow Elisha to divert blame for Dawson’s death.

“The less anyone of us knew about his comrades the better; this is one of the basic principles of any underground organization.”

This line reinforces Dawn’s motif of anonymity. It explains a practical reason for Elisha’s social isolation among Movement fighters and reminds us of his solitude.

“I did not think of David except when they pronounced his name. When they were silent my thoughts went out to someone else, to a man I did not yet know, any more than I knew David, but whom I was fated to know. My David ben Moshe had the name and face of an Englishman, Captain John Dawson.”

Elisha’s ideological convictions become remote in the face of interpersonal association. As a Jewish fighter, he’s supposedly bound to David ben Moshe, but he finds David’s death emotionally remote because they’ve never met. Dawson’s death is more meaningful to Elisha because he’ll be directly implicated in it and will come face to face with the man.

“‘What if the sergeants had refused to settle it amongst themselves?’ I asked. ‘What then?’ Gad squeezed the cup harder than ever, almost as if he were trying to break it. ‘I think I’d have killed myself instead,’ he said in a flat voice. After a moment of heavy silence, he added: ‘I tell you I was young and very weak.’”

Gad reveals that he was once in a predicament similar to Elisha’s, when he was about the same age as Elisha is now. Although Gad is usually characterized as a resolute devotee of the Movement and Revisionist Zionism, his tense silence and self-described weakness betray the same doubt and terror Elisha feels. Gad represses those feelings in order to carry out the Old Man’s will.

“I could never have done it. It’s easier to kill a man than to break the news that he is going to die.”

Sending Gideon to inform Dawson of the execution allows Elisha a bit of distance from the event. Elisha’s feeling that telling Dawson of his death would be harder than actually killing him speaks to his fear of human interaction and connection; his fear of knowing Dawson and delivering terrible news about his fate is greater than his fear of killing Dawson.

“Now I understood. She was referring not to the little boy in the sky but to me. She had spoken to me of love because she knew that I was the little boy who had been turned into a prayer and carried up into Heaven. She knew that I had died and come back to earth, dead. This was why she had spoken to me of love and wanted to make love with me. I saw it all quite clearly. She liked making love with little boys who were going to die; she enjoyed the company of those who were obsessed with death. No wonder that her presence this night in Palestine was not surprising.”

In this passage, Elisha realizes that the connection he felt with Catherine was one-sided. She was attracted to him because she was fascinated by death and tragedy; she regarded his existence only as a morbid curio. This incident only intensified Elisha’s feelings of isolation and inhumanity.

“[…] His silence made me afraid. As I had known him before, he was always present in my hour of need. Then his silence had been reassuring. Now I tried to look into his eyes, but they were two globes of fire, two suns that burned my face.”

Fire is a reoccurring motif in Dawn. It’s strongly connected to violence and anger, and is an especially significant symbol in Dawn because it connects directly to the Holocaust (which literally translates to “sacrifice by fire”). Elisha’s violent memories often evoke fire; in this passage, the use of fire imagery represents the intense judgement Elisha feels from his rabbi’s appraisal and, by extension, his immense guilt at recreating Nazi violence.

“‘You are the sum total of all that we have been,’ said the youngster who looked like my former self. ‘In a way we are the ones to execute John Dawson. Because you can’t do it without us. Now, do you see?’ I was beginning to understand. An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.”

This passage indicates that Elisha’s guilt isn’t only the product of taking a life or recreating the violence he experienced under Nazi rule. He also feels guilty for implicating his loved ones and former self in this action. This passage contradicts Gad’s message in quote 9, which suggests that a person’s death neutralizes their existence.

“‘Go on. Take him something to eat. He’s hungry, you know.’ ‘No,’ I responded. ‘Not I. I don’t want to see him. Above all, I don’t want to see him eat. I want to think of him, later on, as a man who never ate.’ I wanted to add that I had cramps in my stomach, but I realized this was unimportant.”

Elisha’s desire to think of Dawson as “a man who never ate” reflects his need to see Dawson as completely stoic and inhuman. In addition, Elisha ignores his own hunger as an extension of his extreme emotional bluntness and fractured sense of self; he doesn’t feel human, or at least he doesn’t want to feel human.

“A man hates his enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: This fellow, my enemy, has made me capable of hate. I hate him not because he’s my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate. John Dawson has made me a murderer, I said to myself. He has made me a murderer of John Dawson. He deserves my hate.”

This line of thinking echoes a line from Gad’s speech (see quote 9). Like Gad’s rhetoric, this line of thinking is paradoxical and diverts blame for murder from the killer to the victim. However, instead of providing a moral/ethical justification, Elisha is merely searching for a satisfactory motive for a killing beyond being ordered to do so.

“Yes, I had come down to the cellar to feed my hate. It seemed easy enough. Armies and governments the world over have a definite technique for provoking hate. By speeches and films and other kinds of propaganda they created an image of the enemy in which he is the incarnation of evil, the symbol of suffering, the fountainhead of the cruelty and injustice of all times. The technique is infallible, I told myself, and I shall turn it upon my victim. I did try to draw upon it. All enemies are equal, I said. Each one is responsible for the crimes committed by others. They have different faces, but they all have the same hands, the hands that cut my friends’ tongues and fingers.”

Here, Elisha tries to harness the kind of provocative rhetoric the Nazis used to demonize their enemies. However, he’s unable to convince himself that Dawson is evil by knowingly attempting to brainwash himself. In addition, he seems unaware that Gad and the other Movement speakers use this tactic in their own rhetoric.

“‘Why must you try to hate me?’ John Dawson asked again. ‘In order to give my action a meaning which may somehow transcend it.’ Once more he slowly shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for you,’ he repeated.”

As quote 22 shows, Elisha feels that hating Dawson will imbue his killing with meaning that justifies it. However, Elisha can’t access the conviction that Gad espouses in his speech (see quotes 8 and 9). He can’t help but understand Dawson’s execution as a pointless murder rather than a momentous political act.