Song of the Violin

Back in high school, we had to read Night by Elie Wiesel. Only a few scenes stuck with me. Now in college it's assigned reading again. I had to analyze a passage from it. I picked one of the ones that I remembered. The scene with the violin.
It's a room of holocaust prisoners. They're packed to tightly that they're piled on top of each other and suffocating. Elie's friend had carried a violin with him all that way. And he begins to play to that room of the dead and dying. Oh, God. I don't cry that much. But my heart sure was crying. Just ti imagine locked in a room that horrible and then to suddenly hear a beautiful violin singing out? The musician died and his violin was crushed.
Jeez, I need to go to sleep. But I had to write somethign about this. I can't even begin to describe this so I"m loking for the block of text to show you myself. You musicians can probably understand this best.
Ah, found it.
A passage from Night.


“Father, are you there?” I asked as soon as I was able to utter a word.

I knew that he could not be far from me.

“Yes!” a voice replied from far away, as if from another world. “I am trying to sleep.”

He was trying to sleep. Could one fall asleep here? Wasn’t it dangerous to lower one’s guard, even for a moment, when death could strike at any time?

Those were my thoughts when I heard the sound of a violin. A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living? Who was this madman who played the violin here, at the edge of his own grave? Or was it a hallucination?

It had to be Juliek.

He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence.

How had he succeeded in disengaging himself? To slip out from under my body without my feeling it? [Note: they, the prisoners, were piled on top of each other in a crowded barracks.]

The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin, and it was as if Juliek’s soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again.

I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.

I don’t know how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over, dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.