Never Shall I Forget

As the poem is short and expresses the personal emotions of Elie Wiesel, “Never Shall I Forget” qualifies as a lyric. It’s also a part of Holocaust literature—that is, the sizable canon of memoirs, novels, and poems that confront the Nazi genocide. Arguably, Wiesel’s lyric is also a confessional poem. The genre took hold in the mid-20th century, with poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton writing intimate poems about their battles with issues like mental health. In confessional poems, the speaker is usually the author—or the author’s poetic persona—with the author using the poem to express their intense feelings. Wiesel is the speaker of his poem. The experiences and emotions belong to him, not to a dispassionate speaker. He combines the personal with the historical, confessing to the reader how the Holocaust keenly impacted his life, faith, and individuality.

The poem’s tone is indignant and mournful, and it centers on the literary device of anaphora, using the repeated words “Never shall I forget” at the beginning of multiple lines—seven out of the poem’s 13—to stress the deadly inhumanity of the Holocaust. Through this form of repetition, Wiesel doesn’t let the reader forget the extreme horror of the Holocaust and what surviving a horrendous trauma can do to a person, developing a central theme, Trauma and Indelible Memories. The shock of the Holocaust has left Wiesel with memories that he can’t erase or put behind him: They will be with him forever. The repetition also gives the poem a rhythm and melody, turning the work into a mournful chant. Wiesel doesn’t downplay or mitigate the impact of the Holocaust on him. He will always remember the barbaric genocide, so the emotionally heightened language that drives the poem reveals the Holocaust’s all-consuming influence on him. No part of him is left untouched by the Holocaust.

The first memory Wiesel can never forget is “the first night in camp” (Line 1) that “turned [his] life into one long / night seven times seven sealed” (Lines 1-2). Night symbolizes absence, specifically of light. There was no light in the “camp” (Line 1)—an allusion or reference to Auschwitz—it was “sealed” off from humanity and the civilized world; the camp was a dark, monstrous place.

The use of the number “seven” (Line 2) in particular may also be an allusion to the Seven Seals of God from the Book of Revelation, believed by many religious scholars to have been written by John of Patmos. According to the Book of Revelation, John had an apocalyptic vision of Jesus Christ breaking open seven seals on a scroll, each seal releasing a judgment or apocalyptic event onto the world, signaling the end times, or the Apocalypse/Revelation. By stating that his life has become “seven times sealed” (Line 2), Wiesel is comparing the Holocaust to the end times referenced in Revelation. An additional interpretation of the line is that since only Jesus Christ was prophesied to open the seals on the scroll, and given that the Jewish faith does not recognize Christ as the messiah, Wiesel does not believe that anyone could ever unseal or change what his life has turned into. In Night, after “Never Shall I Forget” appears, Wiesel states, “The antechamber of Hell must look like this. So many crazed men, so many cries, so much bestial brutality” (Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Stella Rodway, Bantam Books, 1986, p. 32). Wiesel is in an unenlightened, hellish inferno and surrounded by Death and Inhumanity—another key theme.

Wiesel can’t forget “that smoke” (Line 3) or the “small faces of the children” (Line 4) who became “smoke under a silent sky” (Lines 5). Wiesel uses imagery to paint a grim picture of the smoke he saw—an allusion to the burning of bodies in the camp’s crematorium. After the Nazis killed a group of people in the gas chambers, the concentration camp prisoners working in the Sonderkommando (special unit) had to collect the corpses and burn them. Like “night” (Lines 1, 2), the “silent sky” (Line 5) also symbolizes absence, but instead of a lack of light or goodness, the silence represents a lack of care or intervention. The world wasn’t talking about the mass murders—the world didn’t seem to be doing anything about them.

Using figurative language in the form of metaphor, Wiesel says the flames “consumed [his] faith for ever” (Line 6). The fire from the burning bodies didn’t literally burn his spirituality, but the sight of the ever-present death has made him lose his faith in God to such an extent that he feels as though he has lost it forever. Alternately, the flames did “[consume his] faith” (Line 6) in another way, as Wiesel dedicated his life to drawing attention to the Holocaust and later systematic killings.

The “nocturnal silence that deprived [Wiesel] for all eternity of the / desire to live” (Lines 7-8) links to the theme of Silence and Helplessness. The absence of concern made Wiesel feel like no one cared if he died, so he lost the will to live. About the life-numbing impression of Auschwitz, Wiesel says, “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and / turned my dreams to ashes” (Lines 9-10). He uses another metaphor to show the reader how the Holocaust destroyed his hopes and religious beliefs. It gave him nothing to believe in or look forward to.

The motif of religion continues when Wiesel declares, “Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live / as long as God Himself” (Lines 11-12). Life is not a gift from God but a punishment, and God becomes a derisive figure, with Wiesel pulling God down into the human realm. He’s not an omnipresent figure but a person with a lifespan—even if the lifespan is endless. However, despite his references throughout the poem to the complete destruction of his faith, this small recognition of God’s infinite nature suggests that Wiesel may have some amount of faith left that he is struggling to come to terms with, given all that he has seen.

Wiesel ends his poem with an abrupt snap. He turns “Never shall I forget” into “Never” (Line 13). Wiesel reiterates with this one word that his memories of the Holocaust are a permanent part of him. The word serves as a call to action: Readers of the poem now have these images in their minds as well, and it’s up to them to foster a world where more people don’t have memories and lives impacted by genocide. As Wiesel's activism demonstrates, deliberately killing and hurting of people hasn’t stopped. There is a lot more destruction to never forget.