Revenge, Terrorism, and War
Dawn takes place in British-ruled Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, when a group of young Holocaust survivors are attempting to overthrow British rule in order to establish a safe Jewish homeland. These freedom fighters are referred to simply as “the Movement.” In the story, the Movement has begun exacting revenge for the British government’s execution of Jewish soldiers. In retaliation for the execution of a fighter named David ben Moshe…
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Past, Present, and Future
In Dawn, Wiesel portrays the dead as the witnesses and judges of the present. He does this by having Elisha’s dead acquaintances appear as ghosts at key moments in the story. (Although only Elisha can see these figures, the ghosts’ visibility, and the hot, stuffy sensation they bring with them, suggest that they’re really ghosts, not just Elisha’s memories.) The presence of the dead in the story indicates the heavy shadow of the…
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God and Religion
Though Elisha grew up religiously observant, the Holocaust destroys his youthfully naïve beliefs about God. Yet when Gad recruits Elisha into an organization called the Movement, Elisha’s religious beliefs are rekindled in a different form—one that urges survivors to take the future into their own hands instead of continuing to be victimized. These beliefs undercut some of the very tenets of Elisha’s upbringing, like the belief that killing is wrong, by calling upon people to…
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Hatred, Killing, and Humanity
Early in the book, Elisha observes that becoming a terrorist has damaged his humanity by making him just like the S.S. officers he hated in the concentration camp during the Holocaust. He rightly concludes that, once a person becomes a killer, that aspect of their identity can never be erased. Yet this isn’t the end of Elisha’s story. When Elisha is ordered to execute John Dawson, he feels inexorably drawn to talk to Dawson…
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