ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the subject of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi: the victim as witness, with special reference to the theological significance of their testimony. The testimony of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi is of supreme importance largely because both witnesses to the kingdom of night confronted the issue of God and the Holocaust, each in his own way. In Night Elie Wiesel has told us about his inability to pray on Rosh Hashannah after immersion into the world of Auschwitz. In Detroit Wiesel reminded us that the Germans wanted to destroy the Jews spiritually as well as physically. Wiesel had known the godless world of radical destructiveness both experientially and intellectually. He could deny neither the terrible facts of his experience nor the God of Israel. Unlike Wiesel's, Levi's cultural background was fundamentally the literature of his native language, Italian, and its classical sources in Greco-Roman civilization.
