Difficult to review. Night is a brutal first-hand account of life in Auschwitz. We’re all very familiar with the visuals of the journey in the cattle truck, the arrival in Auschwitz, the squalor and deprivations of life in the barracks, the selections. Wiesel tells us with simple but supremely eloquent prose what effect these daily horrors had on the human soul. Tells us, in effect, how low we can go, how even a son can kill his own father for a morsel of bread if subjected to inhumane treatment for long enough. I’ll just say that probably everyone should read this short book.

This is not a review. I am not worthy to review this book. This is my third time reading Night, having read it as a requirement in both high school and college. I picked it up at the library because it was upright on a shelf and I noticed it had a new preface by the author. I have read that preface four times so far. The PREFACE is that important, that thought-provoking. I am speechless. I am awestruck by the tremendous person that Elie Wiesel is. The story is a heartbreaking, terrifying account of unimaginable suffering that must be read and remembered. 5 stars every time.

Night is Elie Wiesel's memoir about his experiences during the Holocaust. It is shocking and sad, but worth reading because of the power of Wiesel's witnessing one of humanity's darkest chapters and his confession on how it changed him.

In the new introduction to the ebook version I read, Wiesel talked about the difficulty he had putting words to his experience. "Convinced that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them." pg. 7, introduction

The original version of Night was written in Yiddish. I wish I knew enough Yiddish to read it. There's something powerful about reading books in their original form.

Wiesel closes his introduction with his reasons for writing this book: "For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time." pg 12, introduction.

Even though a member of his community warned Wiesel's village about the horrors that awaited them, they didn't believe him. After they were placed in a ghetto, the Jewish population of Sighet thought that the worst was behind them. "Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion." pg 26, ebook.

If I had been in their place, I don't think that I would have acted any differently. How could one possibly imagine the horrors that they were going to face?

Wiesel is starved, overworked and beaten in the concentration camps. He loses more than his family and faith: "One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me." pgs 110-111 ebook.

Another Holocaust survivor's memoir that I highly recommend is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Never forget.

Even though I have read many other books about the Holocaust, none of them have left me feeling quite so haunted as "Night". It's a book that everyone should read. Based on author Elie Wiesel's experiences, the narrator is an observant Jewish fifteen-year-old in the Hungarian village of Sighet. His family and other Jews were sent to live in the ghetto by the Nazis. Then they were loaded onto cattle cars and traveled for days without food to Birkenau. Eliezer and his father were sent to Auschwitz while his mother and sister were placed in another line, probably headed for the crematorium.

Eliezer eloquently remembers the horror of Nazi cruelty--hard labor, beatings, and a lack of food and warm clothing. He shows how fighting for survival can also turn Jews against each other as they fight for a scrap of bread. His father offers emotional support, but is also a burden as he weakens. Eliezer questions his faith in God who allows such evil and suffering in the world. He is transformed physically, emotionally, and spiritually by his experiences.

This chilling quotation sums up Eliezer's reaction to the horror so well:

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never."

What can be said about this book? It should be required reading. It should be taught in English classes, in history classes, in every school. If, like me, you are out of school and never had to read it, pick up a copy right now.

It was so blunt, so raw, and so horrifying, that I didn't even cry. Because from the first moment it was too much. I felt numb, the way that Wiesel himself became numb, because it was simply too awful, and yet too unreal at the same time. I've read books about the Holocaust, nonfiction and fiction, but nothing that was like this. I truly feel that Wiesel's life was spared so that he could bear this powerful witness of the horror of the Holocaust.

This edition also includes his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which did move me to tears, and which should not be missed either. It is a short and fitting epilogue to the book.

From the first few sentences, to the final closings words, I did not move. Elie Wiesel had my complete attention, and total respect, for the immense courage it must have taken to relive the horrors he went through in writing this book. Harrowing and chilling but told with great compassion, his struggle for survival during the holocaust is almost too unbearable to contemplate. But this has to be read, and everyone should do so, it makes all the mundane things in life seem far more important. After the last page was done, I looked out the window of my apartment, up at the sky, down in the street, the noise of the city, the people walking by. The life, the freedom, the hugs, the kisses. What overriding joy.

I'm not going to bother with a synopsis. Night was one of the most emotionally draining books I have ever read. I am probably one of the most emotional people out there. So mix an emotionally draining book with an extremely emotional person with a late night reading... oh boy. Elie Wiesel truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm going to escape the depression this book has caused me by going to bed now...

I can't bring myself to write a review of this book. It did keep my attention and made me feel numb at times, but the things that are missing I wont describe.

For an account so harrowing and as real as this, I find it difficult to actually put a star rating on it. I believe that this book stands and exists as a brutal reminder of what evil humans are actually capable of doing. This is a deeply moving and personal account by Elie Wiesel, who was a Hungarian Jew. He was sent, with his family to the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. Some time later, he was moved to Buchenwald. I think what makes this so unbelievably moving for me, is the way Wiesel describes events, almost calmly, when the reader cannot even begin to imagine the absolute horrors of what he went through. It is heartbreaking to learn that eventually, Wiesel after losing his family, and watching his Father die, he not only lost his faith in God, but humanity himself. To feel that, you truly must be in a very dark place.

This excerpt, nearing the end of the book, was when Wiesel finally got out of the concentration camps:

"One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me."

This is such an important book, and we cannot ever risk it being forgotten.

First published in 1958, my copy is in English. 'Night' is the story of Eliezer (Elie) a son of a Jewish family of six, it is based on his experiences as a prisoner in the concentration camps lasting a little over a year from March 1944 to April 1945 which is in the end of WWII.

At the age of 15/16 Eliezer and his family are sent to the nightmare world of terror and horror he was forced to endure in some of the worst Nazi death camps (including Auschwitz and Buchenwald). His Mother and Sisters sent to one camp and his Father and himself to another. He was a loving Son that kept him and his Father together during such unbelievable treatment.

Reading “Night” left me with a great perspective of the torture they had to endure and how evil men could be. I also wondered, (knowing I should not question why, but) how can one allow such monstrous events to occur to another human being? There are no easy answers, this harrowing year he had to experience and the knowledge he survived, must of wracked him with guilt and heartache.

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget..."

In 1944, at the age of fifteen, Elie Wiesel, his parents and three sisters, were transported from Sighet to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Upon arriving they were ordered, "men to the left, women to the right". Elie would never see his mother and younger sister Sarah again. What followed was two years of living hell, two years of "night".

What it was like in a concentration camp, what it was like for Elie and his father, can not be put into words that would be adequate to describe the reality. But Elie's account is graphic enough to make us wonder how anyone could have survived this horror. Most didn't; Elie's mother and youngest sister Sarah didn't; and Elie's father, who he tried to look after, tried to keep alive, didn't. Elie and his father survived a death march in the dead of winter from Auschwitz to Buchenwald where his father finally succumbed to illness and beatings. In the spring of 1945 the American Army arrived to liberate the camp and end the "night", or the nightmare.

This book is hard to read, as are most books on this horror of the 20th century, but this is first hand account and reminds us of what human ignorance, hatred, and bigotry are capable of, and don't think for one minute it could never happen again because it can.

Elie's two older sisters, Hilda and Bea, both survived the concentration camps and all were later reunited. In 1986 Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

What can I say that hasn't already been said?

This book is the newer translation, with some clarifications to the chronology of people and events, with introductions by Wiesel himself and the man who fought to have the book published, Francois Mauriac.

The prose is in a relatively simple style. After all, the story is dramatic enough; it needs no embellishment. It is as if you are watching the whole thing through a plate-glass window, and you're banging on it, yelling, 'Hey, hey you, they're trying to kill you!' But no one can hear you. It took me several days to read this very thin book (~120 pages), because it can be very hard to bear - emotionally and psychologically.

The amazing thing about this book is that it has never lost its power to communicate to us the horror of Nazi Germany, of the Final Solution, of what men will do to other men for reasons that seem so unimportant. Analysis upon analysis has been done, but yields little except the notion that humanity, if freed from the constraints of humanness, is a scourge on the planet.

And that is always worth remembering.