Dawn

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1960

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Post-Holocaust Jewish Experience

Like many of Elie Wiesel’s works, Dawn—and the entire Night Trilogy—is devoted to exploring the post-Holocaust Jewish experience. As an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor himself, Wiesel imbued Elisha’s story with real-life details based on his own experiences. Elisha’s traumas at Buchenwald reflect one of millions of stories from Jewish concentration camp survivors. This is exemplified by his parents’ and community members’ deaths. In addition, Dawn touches on gentile Holocaust survivors’ experiences through characters like Stefan the German sculptor.

While addressing Jewish persecution by the Nazis, Wiesel explores the Jewish cultural relationship to that persecution. Even before the Holocaust, European Jewish culture was inextricable from what Gad calls a “persecution reflex.” Elisha has his own experiences with this reflex. When he learns about the Movement, he remarks: “This was the first story I had ever heard in which the Jews were not the ones to be afraid. Until this moment I had believed that the mission of the Jews was to represent the trembling of history rather than the wind which made it tremble” (17). This “trembling of history” refers to the numerous pogroms (antisemitic massacres) and exoduses that litter Jewish history, the latest being the Holocaust, the single most ambitious pogrom in modern history. After barely surviving genocide, Elisha finds the aggression fueling Revisionist Zionism refreshing and exciting.

Following World War II, political Zionism grew increasingly popular, especially among Jewish people. In the 1940s, modern Zionism’s creation was still in living memory, if barely. Meeting Gad is Elisha’s first brush with this ideology:

It was the first time I had heard any of these things. 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 the map or a political slogan, a cause for which men killed and died (18).

As a Movement recruiter, Gad uses Jewish persecution and the sacred ideal of Zionism as rhetorical devices to gain Elisha’s interest.

Going from Nazi death camps to a paramilitary terrorist organization is a jarring shift for Elisha. This shift is accompanied by much traveling, most of it compulsory. The Nazis flushed Elisha out of his hometown; they sent him to ghettos and to concentration camps. When the Americans liberated Buchenwald, he gained asylum in France and spent time in Paris and Normandy; from there, he left for British Mandatory Palestine. After spending years under violent attack because of his Jewishness, Elisha rapidly shifts gears and becomes a paramilitary combatant in the name of a sovereign Jewish state. He struggles to uncouple Jewish persecution and defense from Jewish aggression and extremism.

Victimhood

Elisha dwells heavily on the notion of Jews as the default victims of history. His time as a victim of Nazi violence seemed to confirm this belief. Gad presented Zionism as a panacea for Jewish victimhood, and in accepting the call for recruitment, Elisha became bent on defying the Jews’ historic role as “the ones to be afraid” (17). Nevertheless, Elisha is unable to shake his deep-seated feelings of powerlessness in the face of suffering and misfortune.

Elisha views himself as a victim of not just the Nazis and antisemitic violence, but also of Gad and the Movement. Even though he freely volunteered to join the Movement, he blames Gad for “making” him into a terrorist. Although he could technically choose to disobey the order to execute Dawson, he never even considers it. Elisha’s overwhelming feelings of powerlessness make it difficult for him to make active decisions and take responsibility for his own actions.

Although he understands that John Dawson is his victim, Elisha finds this thought abhorrent. In an attempt to soothe himself, he invests much thought and emotion into convincing himself that he’s simultaneously Dawson’s victim. He dwells heavily on the idea that Dawson deserves his hate:

As I went down the stairs I was sure that I would meet the man who had condemned David ben Moshe to death, the man who had killed my parents, the man who had come between me and the man I had wanted to become, and who was now ready to kill the man in me. I felt quite certain that I would hate him. The sight of his uniform added fuel to my hate. There is nothing like a uniform for whipping up hate. When I saw his slender hands I said to myself: Stefan will carve out my hate for them. (95)

Had he been able to maintain this hatred for Dawson, Elisha would also have been able to frame the execution as a retaliation against an oppressor, rather than the senseless killing of a kidnapped hostage.

While addressing the slated executions on her radio program, Ilana notes that while Dawson is a victim of circumstance, ben Moshe isn’t; he’s a martyr: “David ben Moshe’s death is meaningful; John Dawson’s death is not. David is a hero, John a victim” (22). This view of ben Moshe as a martyr rather than a victim reappears in Elisha’s inner monologue. As he prepared to execute John, Elisha imagines David as an idealized and uncomplicated hero bravely facing death with open eyes. Like John, David was captured under mundane circumstances and likely faced the gallows unwillingly. However, Elisha and the other fighters reflexively elevated him to “hero” status, much as Elisha tried to demonize Dawson. Regardless of these trappings, they’re essentially the same: two prisoners of war condemned to die by the enemy.

Death and Suffering as a Result of Military Conflict

The events of Dawn are heavily influenced by two military conflicts: World War II and the skirmishes between Zionist paramilitary groups and the occupying British army. (Although British Mandatory Palestine was involved in a series of contemporaneous military clashes with Palestinian Arabs, Wiesel focuses solely on the battles between the Jewish settlers and the British military.)

Elisha is a walking example of the pain caused by WWII and the Holocaust. He sees this death and suffering in the form of the ghosts of friends and family killed by Nazis. Likewise, his experiences with the Movement speak to the suffering caused by clashes between Zionists and the British, and he sees faces of the dead in his window at night. The book implies that he’s the only Holocaust survivor in his group, yet Ilana, Gad, Joab, and Gideon all have harrowing near-death stories to share, all of which their engagement with the Movement made possible.

All the characters’ lives have been consumed by war; as Ilana remarks: “War is like night […] it covers everything” (68). War’s impact on Elisha is obvious; violence, death, and loss are virtually all he thinks about. Likewise, Gad often repeats the phrase “This is war” (which Iliana echoes) in a hollow attempt to absolve Elisha of Dawson’s death. When Gad says, “This is war,” it‘s not merely a statement of fact; invoking war is a reminder that their situation is necessarily dire and violent. Elisha’s status as a Movement fighter requires him to do heinous things. Knowing this doesn’t soothe Elisha’s nerves; the circumstances don’t make his actions any less barbarous, regardless of whether they’re politically expedient or necessary.

Each of Elisha’s ghosts represents a distinct loss of life, culture, faith, family unit, or friendships—and the death of Elisha’s sense of self. Every ghost Elisha mentions died because of war. Although his family, friends, and child-self all died because of World War II, John Dawson joins them upon his death, which was the product of a different conflict. However, Elisha’s presence in British Mandatory Palestine was heavily influenced by the events of World War II. Just as he connects each of his ghosts to Dawson’s murder, Dawson’s death is one of countless ways that World War II inevitably connects to the clashes in Palestine. In addition, Elisha’s ghosts, although fictional, represent only one example of losses caused by the Holocaust. All survivors—Wiesel included—are haunted by their own “ghosts.”