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Second Place Winner Level III - Jasmine Chen
Ames High School
"Night" by Elie Wiesel

 

Dear Mr. Wiesel,

 

            If you had asked me a few years ago whether or not I was a slave to silence, I doubt I would have denied the allegation.  Always the quiet child, I spend most of my time skipping recess to read, write, and draw, dreaming thoughts into threads of existence.  During speeches my voice was barely audible over the whirring of the overhead machine, the class unsettlingly magnified against the rows of manila wafer desks and steely chrome chairs.  I was trapped in a world of shy ingenuity, ideas that forced themselves to the back of my head and stayed there, straining, until the chance at extraction had long passed.  Worst of all, I forgot about these ideas, for to me the chance was dead and the thought was no longer a tangible vision about a trivial pebble dropped into the waves of peripheral nature.  All my life I have regarded silence as simply a moment of insecurity, a caesura, the ephemeral hesitation in time before deciding to shrink back into the void of apathy, regarding silence as just as insignificant as my ideas.

 

It was not until I read your book Night, Mr. Wiesel that I finally came to understand the creature I had become-- not merely pathetic, but repulsively destructive, ignorant to the effects of my long-withheld voice.  Through the characters and experiences you described about the Holocaust, your emphasis on the obstructive power of silence has and will never leave me, changing my every move to those of confidence in my beliefs, opinions, and, most importantly, my newly open attitude.  Unlike the detachedly taut pages of history textbooks, I heard in Night the voices of real people, screaming to me through your true-to-life accounts, not a snapshot, a video, but tongues of the dead among the living.  I listened as the warnings of Moshe the Beadle were ignored by the townspeople, their scornful mockery ringing in my ears.  I sat, transfixed, as the cautioning visions described by the "mad" woman in the truck were disregarded as a mere annoyance, her words vain towards merciless ears and fists.  When even her own son failed to object to the beatings inflicted upon her, I felt severely chastised, condemned, as if I had been that motionless child.  Each one cried to me, relentlessly searching my soul.  All human, and yet their identities had almost been erased by silence, the same silence which had allowed the dead to become piles of withered bodies strewn in masses and masses of emulsifying graves.

 

Reading Night has significantly changed me as a person, both inside and out.  Mr. Wiesel, you have truly inspired a timid girl to deliver her opinions and ideas with determination, conviction, and self-confidence.  Since then, I have grown increasingly active by joining speech club and participating in debates, and though I still love to read, write, and draw, I have added to my ways of expression speech, a surprisingly refreshing medium through which to convey my truest emotions.  Although the past cannot be undone, the future is being continually shaped, molded by the voices of me and my generation, and I can only hope that others, after reading your book, will realize just as I have the importance of speaking my mind.  I firmly believe that ideas pressed into that void of apathy yield apathetic people, and it is only when the world forms a vigorous, passionate, and contemplative community that the threat of devastating events such as the Holocaust will ultimately perish.  Silence, the evitable pause before a breath is drawn, haunts me but does not win.  I now know it is repression at its worst.  Thanks to your empowering words, Mr. Wiesel, I have emancipated myself from the chains of silence, never again to play slave to my bane of burden.

 

Yours Truly,

Jasmine Chen