Night

I purchased Night by Elie Wiesel because I first read it in high school and wanted to have my own copy to keep in my collection. It’s such a powerful and unforgettable memoir that left a lasting impression on me, and I wanted to preserve it for future reflection and reference. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to understand history, human resilience, and the importance of remembering the past.

The risk inherent in writing about the Holocaust is that today's readers have a hard time believing it. Those of us who did not experience the horrors of living in a Nazi death camp cannot begin to understand what it was like. Battered women and severely abused children living today, trapped in circumstances they cannot escape, may come close. But most of us have no frame of reference. Nothing in our experience even remotely compares. This "I can't believe it" mentality was also common among non-Jewish civilians who lived in Germany during the Third Reich--when Adolf Hitler was in power (1933-1945). Even as "night" descended on Wiesel's little town--Sighet, Transylvania (Hungary)--the Jewish people could not believe what was happening. Moishe the Beadle was "deported" by the Hungarian police, crammed into a cattle car and taken to a forest in Poland to be executed with other Jews. Incredibly, Moishe escaped and returned to Sighet with his story: "The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. . . ." Moishe's escape was a miracle. He was wounded in the leg and left for dead. In Sighet, he went from house to house, telling his story, but the people refused to listen. Even the young Elie Wiesel did not believe him. The denial continued. In Jewish families about to be transported to Auschwitz, "the women were boiling eggs, roasting meat, preparing cakes, sewing backpacks." Wiesel does not challenge us to comprehend the gas chamber deaths of his mother and little sister Tzipora. Instead, he writes what we can grasp: "Tzipora was holding Mother's hand. I saw them walking farther and farther away; Mother was stroking my sister's blond hair as if to protect her. And I walked on with my father, with the men. I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever." Wiesel describes with remarkable restraint a vicious beating he receives from a Kapo: I felt the sweat running down my back. "A-7713!" I stepped forward. "A crate!" he ordered. They brought a crate. "Lie down on it! On your belly!" I obeyed. I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip. "One!. . . Two!. . ." he was counting. He took his time between lashes. Only the first really hurt. I heard him count. "Ten. . .eleven!. . ." His voice was calm and reached me as through a thick wall. "Twenty-three. . ." Two more, I thought, half unconscious. The Kapo was waiting. "Twenty-four. . .twenty five!" It was over. . . . "Listen to me, you son of a swine!" said Idek coldly. "So much for your curiosity. You shall receive five times more if you dare tell anyone what you saw! Understood?" I nodded, once, ten times, endlessly. As if my head had decided to say yes for all eternity. Elie Wiesel's magnificent NIGHT bridges that enormous gulf between "I can't believe it" and the mind-numbing, horrific sinking in of the realization of "Oh, dear God, this really happened." His account is straightforward, almost matter-of-fact, with a minimum of frenzy, inordinate dwelling on flames of infernos, prolonged death throes, or metaphysical discourses about evil. He does talk about his relationship with God throughout the ordeal. And of course about his father, who was with him in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Why did Wiesel write this book? He tells us: "There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don't know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival. . . . "In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer--or my life, period--would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory. . . ." I am grateful for this book and for Marion Wiesel's excellent and sensitive translation of her husband's memoir. Some great literature has come out of the Holocaust. In my opinion, Elie Wiesel's NIGHT is the best book, and certainly one of the most deeply moving among these works. Arlene Sanders

Elie Wiesel’s Night: Shedding Light upon the Darkness Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night (New York, Hill and Wang, 2006, translated by Marion Wiesel), is one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed work about the Holocaust. The New York Times called the 2006 edition “a slim volume of terrifying power,” yet its power wasn’t immediately appreciated. In fact, the book may have never been written had Wiesel not approached his friend, the novelist Francois Mauriac, for an introduction to the French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, whom he wanted to interview. When Mauriac, a devoted Catholic, mentioned that Mendes-France was suffering like Jesus, Elie Wiesel responded, in the heat of the moment, that ten years earlier he had seen hundreds of Jewish children suffer more than Jesus did on the cross, yet nobody spoke about their suffering. Mauriac appeared moved and suggested that Wiesel himself write about it. The young man took his friend’s advice. He began writing in Yiddish an 862-page manuscript about his experiences of the Holocaust. The Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina published in Yiddish an abbreviated version of this book, under the title And the World Remained Silent. Wiesel later translated the text into French. He called it, more simply and symbolically, Night (La Nuit), and sent it to Mauriac, who helped Wiesel find a publisher (the literary and small publishing house Les Editions de Minuit) and wrote its Preface. The English version, published in 1960 by Arthur Wang of Hill and Wang, received strong critical acclaim despite initially modest sales. Elie Wiesel’s eloquent and informed interviews helped bring the difficult subject of the Holocaust to the center of public attention. By 2006, Oprah Winfrey selected Night for her high-profile book club, further augmenting its exposure. This work is definitely autobiographical—an eloquent memoir documenting Wiesel’s family sufferings during the Holocaust—yet, due to its literary qualities, the text has been also read as a novel or fictionalized autobiography. The brevity, poignant dialogue, almost lyrical descriptions of human degradation and suffering, and historical accuracy of this multifaceted work render Night one of the most powerful Holocaust narratives ever written. Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel was only 15 years old when the Nazis entered Sighet in March of 1944, a small Romanian town in Northern Transylvania which had been annexed to Hungary in 1940. At the directives of Adolf Eichmann, who took it upon himself to “cleanse” Hungary of its Jews, the situation deteriorated very quickly for the Jewish population of Sighet and other provincial towns. Within a few months, between May and July 1944, approximately 440,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly those living outside of Budapest, were deported to Auschwitz aboard 147 trains. Wiesel’s entire family—his father Chlomo, his mother Sarah, and his sisters Tzipora, Hilda and Beatrice—suffered this fate. Among them, only Elie and two of his sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, managed to survive the Holocaust. However, since the women and the men were separated at Auschwitz upon arrival, Elie lost track of what happened to his sisters until they reunited after the war. In the concentration camps, father and son clung to each other. Night recounts their horrific experiences, which included starvation, forced labor, and a death march to Buchenwald. Being older and weaker, Chlomo becomes the target of punishment and humiliation: he’s beaten by SS officers and by other prisoners who want to steal his food. Weakened by starvation and fatigue, he dies after a savage beating in January 1945, sadly, only a few weeks before the Americans liberated the concentration camp. Throughout their tribulations, the son oscillates between a paternal sense of responsibility towards his increasingly debilitated father and regarding his father as a burden that might cost him his own life. Elie doesn’t dare intervene when the SS officer beats Chlomo, fearing that he himself will become the next victim if he tries to help his father. In the darkness and despair of Night, the instinct of self-preservation from moment to moment counteracts a lifetime of familial love. Even when Elie discovers the death of his father in the morning, he experiences through a sense of absence: not only his father’s absence, as his bunk is now occupied by another inmate, but also the lack of his own human response: “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...” (112) Night is offers a stark psychological account the process of human and moral degradation in inhumane conditions. Even the relatively few and fortunate survivors of the Nazi atrocities, such as Elie, became doubly victimized: the victims of everything they suffered at the hands of their oppressors and the victims of everything they witnessed others suffer and were unable or, perhaps more sadly, unwilling to help. Although Night focuses on the loss of humanity in the Nazi concentration camps, the author’s life would become a quest for regaining it again, in far better conditions, if at least one condition is met: caring about the suffering of others. As Wiesel explains to his audience on December 10, 1986 during his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Oslo, his message to his son--and his message to the world at large—is about the empathy required to keep the Holocaust memory alive. He reminds us all, “that I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. … We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (118). Claudia Moscovici, Holocaust Memory

Great book. I sobbed on multiple occasions. Definitely a good read for those interested in the holocaust.

No one should need an excuse to re-read a book as powerful as Night, but if I needed one, the new(er) translation by the author’s wife provided it. Everything that needs to be said about this book has been said, I suppose, many times over. In its brief, straightforward narrative it captures not just the horror of the attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews, but the destruction that was wrought even in the souls of survivors. Amid all the other losses, including members of his family, the loss that persists through the book, is the narrator-author’s loss of faith, the loss of God. The one thing that might have helped make sense of the grotesque insanity was gone, and with it, a large portion of the previously pious young victim’s self and soul. Remarkably (particularly given how pious the narrator was before being herded in cattle cars with so many others to Auschwitz), the complete loss of a sense of God’s justice did not happen over the course of a long incarceration as he struggled to find meaning in the light of faith. The change was immediate, everything was lost in a day, so brutal, so thorough, was the Nazi violation. How could a just God let this happen? There are so many memorable scenes in this short book: the journey in the cramped cattle cars; the arrival at the camp; the sight, sound, and ash of the crematorium; the hanging of a child; the crusts of bread; the forced march when the camp was abandoned at war’s end; the gratuitous murders even in a place where gratuitous murder was the organizing principle. And there are so many painful moments, most having to do with loss: the loss of God, the loss of identity, the loss of friends and family, in the end the loss of his father, too, who was his mainstay through most of the ordeal. But there are also moments of remembering that humanity must be preserved. As the camp was being evacuated, the prisoners stopped long enough to clean their prison camp. Why? To let the liberating army know “that here lived men and not pigs.” I was reminded of Italian chemist Primo Levi’s account of his imprisonment in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, in which he describes the ex-army sergeant who washed daily, even though the water was dirty and he had only his soiled clothes to dry himself with. But he did it, and encouraged others to do the same, for the sake of dignity more than cleanliness, to remain human and to prevent the machine of war, imprisonment, and dehumanization from turning prisoners into beasts, as its masters wished it to do. This book is a ringing call to remember, and to resist injustice, ignorance, and apathy. As Wiesel said in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 (reprinted at the end of this book): “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

This book was required reading during my high school years, but I wanted to read it again. If it is not required reading now, it should be. Sadly I'm not sure it is still required, as I have witnessed that many younger people do not learn about the Holocaust in school. I am told it is because it will "upset" the kids. Well, many things in history are not pleasant, but it is still history and it does the people who suffered a disservice to ignore events or candy coat them somehow just to make them less unpleasant. I think it also teaches resilience and strength to learn of horrible events in history, which builds a stronger human being in the end. I think Mr. Wiesel would agree with me, and his book Night is a prime place to start with teaching about the human spirit, the good and the bad. Reading this book at a younger age, I was driven to learn more about the Holocaust and was inspired to visit a concentration camp in Austria upon high school graduation. I'll never forget walking through the forest leading up to Mauthausen, feeling as if I could smell the burnt, smoky air from the crematoriums decades prior. One could still see the scratches in the walls of the showers where people were gassed, and countless other horrifying details that were somehow frozen in time, kept original, at this concentration camp-turned memorial. Though I would recommend it, you don't have to visit an actual concentration camp to learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust and some of the darkest days in human history. Night is a human document of what happened and brings the reader into the experience in such a way that you will feel as if you traveled to the site and witnessed the events as they were happening. A great and very important book.

My Comprehension of the holocaust started in the seventh grade, thanks to my extraordinary teacher, Mr. A. Baldwin. The year was 1960-61. I was twelve. In class we watched an abundace of film taken by the Third Reich, memoralzing their murdering conquest in Europe and Russia. The lessons learned were branded into my thinking. This book, "Night", is not fiction. From the author, who is the central figure in this brutally clear account: "If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one". There is a Preface, a Foreward and at the end, Elie's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. In between are the most powerful 116 pages I have read in my 77 years.

NIGHT was among the first widely read accounts of a Holocaust concentration camp survivor. It was originally over eight hundred pages in Yiddish. Weisel worked with the material, re-writing and editing it, first into a two hundred forty five page version published in Argenitina, then into a one hundred seventy page version published in France. NIGHT reached its final form with its one hundred sixteen page publication in 1960 in English in the United States. Wiesel declares that every word of the work is true and he describes NIGHT as his "testimony." Critics tend to feel that the basis for the work is factual, but that Wiesel's long and meticulous re-write and editing has transformed what would have been simple fact into a work of art open to a variety of understandings. Whatever the case, the English-language publication was among the first widely read personal accounts of the Holocaust, and it continues to draw both readers and praise to the present day. The book is written in an unexpectedly matter of fact tone and lacks any trace of self-pity. As such it has an quality that is very difficult to define, one in which most human emotion seems to have been burned away by the experiences the writer endured. Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, a fairly large town first claimed by Romania and later by Hungary. Wiesel writes that he was a studious boy, deeply religious, and the son of respected people. They had heard rumors of how Jews were treated by Germans, but the war seemed very far away, and the stories were incredible to them--even when they were told by a man well known to the Jewish community. The process was fairly slow, with Jews forced to wear the Star of David, prohibited from this and that, and finally forced to live in two "ghettos" in the city. Then, in May 1944, the Jews of Sighet were deported to Auschwitz. Wiesel was sixteen at the time. He would spend about year in various camps before arriving at Buchenwald, where he was liberated by Allied Forces in 1945. When he saw himself in a mirror for the first time since his incarceration, he was horrified by the reflection, which seemed to be that of a living corpse. The book has an abrupt and episodic nature, but most of it focuses on Wiesel's relationship with his father Schlomo Wiesel, and how the two men successfully stayed together during their time in the camps, and how the two men less successfully attempted to care for each other. Although NIGHT is filled with horrors, the ultimate one occurs when the grinding hell of the camp system causes Wiesel to reject feeling for his father as a hinderance to his own survival. Wiesel is also prompted to question God, and whether God exists, and if so how God can accept the Nazi's systematic destruction of the Jews. As one individual cynically comments to Wiesel in NIGHT, he believes in Hitler--because Hitler has kept every promise he ever made to the Jews. There are moments of light scattered in the work--stars in the darkness--a Frenchwoman who risks herself to encourage Wiesel, a friend whose dying act is a gift of music--but for the most part NIGHT is night indeed, and there is no escape. For all its brevity, it is painful to read, difficult to grasp, and incredibly frightening in the ordinary tone in which it is told. The book is published with a preface by Wiesel, a forward by Francois Mauriac, and the text of Wiesel's 1986 speech in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. Strongly recommended. GFT, Amazon Reviewer