Night is Elie Wiesel's somewhat fictionalized portrayal of the year he endured at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It is a harrowing tale of his experiences within and between concentration camps, his gradual loss of faith (as a devoutly observant Jew, he naturally questioned where God was while his people were being exterminated), and his feelings of guilt when he realized that his struggle for survival was making him callous towards his dying father. The material is gruesome and chilling, leaving me in a state of profound silence after reading it. Yet, I also felt a certain dissatisfaction with the book. I craved more detail. I longed for more fully developed writing rather than a series of meaningful one-line paragraphs. I desired less heavy-handed symbolism (the book predominantly focuses on troubled father-and-son relationships, echoing the central Father-and-Son relationship) and more genuine emotion. I wished for a writer (and a translator) who was more discerning than to refer to an SS officer simply as 'an SS'. And above all, I wanted a less abrupt ending. I wanted to inquire of Wiesel what transpired in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald. I wanted to ask him about what happened to his leg, which he marched on for several grueling days just days after undergoing an operation, and how he pieced his life back together afterwards, and why on earth his two eldest sisters, who perished in Auschwitz along with his mother and younger sister, merited no more than a single mention. The latter, I thought, was an example of seriously shoddy writing.
Perhaps my questions were addressed in the original version of Night, which unfortunately never saw the light of day. In his introduction to the new English translation of Night, Wiesel mentions that the book as it stands today is a severely abridged version of a much lengthier Yiddish original titled And the World Remained Silent. I can understand why the original might not have been published (apart from the fact that the world was not yet ready for concentration camp literature, the few quotes provided in the introduction make for rather dense reading). The abridged version does seem more accessible than the full-length one and does an admirable job of conveying the facts. Even so, I believe the publishers may have gone a step too far in abridging the book to such an extent. Undoubtedly, the very brevity of Night is one of the reasons for its popularity today, but personally, I would have preferred to see a middle ground between the original (detailed) manuscript and the incredibly spare and skeletal version that is currently on sale. Do not misunderstand me; the abridged version is effective, but as far as I am concerned, it is the Holocaust presented for those with short attention spans. I much prefer Primo Levi and Ella Lingens-Reiner's more comprehensive accounts of life in the camps, not to mention several Dutch books that, regrettably, have never been translated into other languages.
Nonetheless. Night remains an important book and one that deserves to be widely read. In fact, it is a book that should be read by people of all ages and nationalities, in order to prevent a nightmare of this magnitude from ever recurring.