Out of the Dark by McKenzie

Out of the Dark by McKenzie - July 2013 Scholarship Essay

               The colors, black and white, are boring to most people. They are simple. There’s no excitement or color or pizzazz. But if you ask me, there are no two colors more beautiful. The clean white of paper with small black words typed across in neat rows. I’ll take that over a sunset on the beach any day. It’s not so much that the page itself is something to marvel, but the words on that page, the combination of letters and sentences and phrases that combine to form a new world, that is true beauty. These words can take you to that sunset, or they can take you to a fantasy world. They can make you fall in love. They can make you cry. And if you’re truly lucky, like I was, they can take a small seventh grader’s seemingly meaningless life and transform it completely.
                It was a normal day in English two weeks after we had gotten back from Christmas break. We did our warm-ups and waited for instructions from our teacher, Ms. Gipson. Instead of starting a lecture or opening a PowerPoint, she started handing out books. Because I sat in the back, I was one of the last ones to receive a book. I remember craning my neck trying to catch a glimpse of the title. I was praying that this book wasn’t as awful as the last one. I could not handle a Count of Monte Cristo repeat. There are just some things that kids should not have to handle, and stories about vengeful people in revolutionary France are one of them. When she finally got back to me, the first glance was promising. It wasn’t too long. That in itself was cause for celebration. The cover art was nothing to brag about, but I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt because the title was so intriguing. Night by Elie Wiesel. I liked night time, even though I really didn’t get to experience much of it consciously seeing as my bed time was nine o’clock. That was beside the point though. I liked the stars. I liked the lights shining through the windows. I especially liked the dreams. Dreams, which like books, had the ability to transport you into a whole new world of possibility and magic. Caught up in my fantasies, I failed to notice that this was not a glamorous fairy tale. There were no princesses or magic wands or happily ever afters. This was a story of difficult trials, unbelievable hardships, and loss of faith.
                Ms. Gipson finished class by giving us background information about the Holocaust and told us to read the first section that night. I was surprisingly unaffected by the lesson in class. It seemed like it had happened so long ago and Europe was so far away. I didn’t even know anyone who was Jewish. I didn’t follow the current happenings of the world, much less the ones from the past. I didn’t read newspapers. I didn’t watch the news. I didn’t worry about the rest of the world, and the Holocaust in Europe definitely qualified as the rest of the world. My little world was what mattered. The rest could wait until I was older, old enough to actually impact it. I didn’t see how this old book could relate at all to the lives of seventh graders in a small town in Texas.
               Being the stubborn procrastinator that I was, I didn’t start reading the book until late that night. The sun had already set long ago. It was me, Elie, and a night light. Immediately, as soon as I read that first page, I was transported back in time fifty years ago. I was in World War II era Europe without ever leaving my bed. I learned the Torah and rode in the cramped spaces of the cattle cars to Auschwitz. I said good-bye to my mother and sisters forever. I watched people starve and waste away until there was nothing left but the walking dead. I watched my father die. When I finally set the book down, I looked at the clock. It was 3:00 in the morning. I was in Texas, not Europe. I could hear my parents and sister breathing in the next room over. I was alive and so was my family, but I was changed.
                The fact that a kid my age had written this story made it all the more relatable. And the fact that this story was an account of real life events made it all the more shocking. I was horrified and impressed. The story touched me in a way that I had not thought possible. I started searching for more information about the Holocaust. I was bombarded with information about other genocides that have stained the pages of our history books, some within the last decade. My young mind couldn’t comprehend the cruelty and inhumanity of it all. Over the next year, my English class started a group to raise genocide awareness. We were featured in USA Today. We met Holocaust survivors, and we even got the opportunity to meet the president of Rwanda, the scene of one of the most recent genocides. Looking back on this experience, I am still astounded that a group of seventh and eighth graders could be so thoroughly changed. That is the power of literature. A hundred-page memoir has the ability to inspire people half a world apart, half a century later. When we learn the alphabet as children, little do we know that we are being given weapons with which to impact the world, positively or negatively. I keep that book on my desk as a reminder that though the black of night can be hopeless and gruesome, the white light of morning holds wonder, possibility, and opportunity to make the day, the world, great.