“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. […] And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.”

5★
This is “the” Holocaust book, and it is presumptuous of me to even comment, but here goes.

“‘No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me…’ [Moshe the Beadle] That was toward the end of 1942.
. . .
Spring 1944. Good news from the Russian front. No doubt could remain now of Germany's defeat.
. . .
‘The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it. . . ’ (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)
. . .
Then came the ghetto.
. . .
we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic. . . .
. . .
Everyone marveled at it.”

Slowly, slowly, the Jewish population of Sighet, a small town in Transylvania (Romania) was squeezed out of their homes and into a ghetto. But the Russians were due any day now, and surely things can’t really be as bad as Moshe the Beadle kept saying. People don’t do that to each other.

Moshe the Beadle had been a “man of all work” at the temple, an insignificant, unimposing, inconsequential little man who was treated with what I’d call fond disregard. Young Eliezer Wiesel was a very devout boy of twelve who loved the old stories and read them almost as if they were current news. He would run home to tell his mother what had ‘just happened’, almost as if a child warned their parents about the Big Bad Wolf who had tricked Little Red Riding Hood.

His father said he was too young to study seriously, but Moshe was happy to discuss everything with him. Sadly, Moshe was one of the so-called ‘foreign’ Jews who were the first to be deported from the villages. Nobody really understood, but they pretty much forgot about him . . . until he returned. He had miraculously escaped! He wanted to warn them.

“Moshe had changed. There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or of the cabbala, but only of what he had seen. People refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to them. ‘He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has!’ they said. Or even: ‘Poor fellow. He's gone mad.’ And as for Moshe, he wept.”

Wiesel describes his childhood, family, and town with loving care. We know what kind of people they were, what kind of life they lived and how they cared for each other and their village.

As the Jewish members of the community were gradually pulled together into the ghetto, and then the ghetto was shrunk, Elie’s father declined the opportunity to fill out papers to apply for emigration permits to Palestine. He was too old to change, he said. This will end soon.

But change he would. The remaining Jews were finally told to collect a few things and some food and were put in the infamous cattle cars to be sent to the camps. Weisel describes every thought and every step of the way with great care. A particularly moving passage, for those of us who are reading today, knowing the truth, was when a woman looked out of the carriage into the night.

“It was Madame Schachter. Standing in the middle of the wagon, in the pale light from the windows, she looked like a withered tree in a cornfield. She pointed her arm toward the window, screaming: ‘Look! Look at it! Fire! A terrible fire! Mercy! Oh, that fire!’
. . .
There was nothing there; only the darkness.
. . .
‘She's mad, poor soul. ’”

It happened again, and finally again at Auschwitz when they looked and saw the flame of the crematorium. She wasn’t mad. For whatever reason she could foresee the dangers that Moshe the Beadle had tried to warn them about. Weisel spent a year in the camps when he was 15, lost his family, and somehow survived. He spares no details, and I have trouble understanding how anyone survived the abuse, the cold, the starvation. I think I'd have curled up and let the snow take me.

Weisel said he waited ten years after the end of the war before writing this because silence is as important as words. I sympathise, but his words are so important to counteract the silence of so many others.

After breaking his silence, he wrote his first draft, which he says was 900 pages in Yiddish. This edition which I read in English, was translated from French and is much shorter. He worked as a journalist in France for several years before making his home in the United States where he was a Professor in the Humanities at Boston University for many years. Whatever the language, the experience is universally horrifying, but his memory is crucial and must be shared.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said,

“. . . this honor belongs to all the survivors and their children, and through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember: he asked his father: ‘Can this be true?’ This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?

And now the boy is turning to me: ‘Tell me,’ he asks. ‘What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?’

And I tell him that I have tried. 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.”

Elie Wiesel did everything possible to make sure nobody forgets. He travelled the world, working with world leaders in trouble spots, including Rwanda, to remind us all that this “othering” and ethnic cleansing must be stopped.

The subject matter and the experiences are as heartbreaking as you’d imagine, but we must remember. Australians say “Lest we forget” as we remember all the soldiers who have died for the country. And yet the world still turns a blind eye to Rwanda, Cambodia, the Rohingya, refugees . . . the list goes on.

If you read only one book about the Holocaust, read this one, and carry on the campaign for human rights and calling out abuse for what it is.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

This book is a shocking and very personal account of the authors time spend in german concentracion camps. Night felt more real than any of the other holocaust memoirs I've read before, and I think this is because Elie tells you how he felt and not just what he saw.

I've never really thought about what it must have felt like to be very religious and then have all of these horrible events happen to you for no reason. Before reading this book I also did not understand how living like this year in and year out dehumanizes you. How a father and son can kill each other for a piece of crust.

This is definitely one of the most touching and insightful memoirs I have read in a long time.

Ein weiteres Buch gegen das Vergessen.
Elie Wiesel beschränkt sich auf die wichtigsten Fakten,
um vom Grauen des Holocausts nicht abzulenken.

n   "Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terri- fying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind? Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, to help prevent history from repeating itself? Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one's knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature?" n

n  Initial Thoughtsn

I needed to read a memoir/biography as part of a group reading challenge. Not being a huge fan of this type of work I wanted something fairly short and hard hitting. I could not have made a better choice than Eli Wiesel's Night.

Clocking in at just over one hundred pages, This is a very short, but very sobering story of a young Jewish/Romanian man who survived his time in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

n   "NEVER SHALL I FORGET that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed." n

The author himself was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for spreading his message across the world as an author and public speaker. I had no doubt this was going to be a difficult read, but no doubt a very important one.

n  The Storyn

In May 1944 Elie Wiesel was 15 when the Nazis came to his hometown of Sighet, Transylvania, to extract the Jewish population to concentration camps. He was sent to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. The story is an account of atrocity that followed.



From the start he paints an unbelievably harrowing picture as he and his father are separated from his mother and sister. He then describes the day to day struggles they experienced as they were to put to work as slaves. Hanging over them was the constant threat of execution if they displeased their captors in any way.

Although it’s an extremely emotional and painful story, it gave me a first hand insight into the horror of what took place. It's very hard to put this into perspective but the events that take place within the confines of this short book left me under no illusion of the brutality of the Nazi regime.

n  The Writingn

The writing in Night was surprisingly good with Weisel's prose being direct and clear, leaving me little room for interpretation, but being powerful and heavy with emotion with some expert description. For me the least I expect from an author's writing is that it shouldn't get in the way of the story and this delivers with astounding effect. Eli makes the events both extremely real and very personal putting me right there with him through all that horror and deprivation.

n   "truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes…chil- dren thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)" n

The book is loaded with some heavy themes and one I particularly homed in on was the battle to retain ones faith when subject to that degree of human cruelty. In the midst of that level of evil a person whole sense of reality is brought into question as friend turns on friend in a battle to keep alive. It made me look inside myself and ask what I would do. Sobering stuff.

n  Final Thoughtsn

This book was a very bleak, very dark but totally unforgettable. It often feels like a work of fiction and I really wish it was. But this book has great historical significance.
As what took place during World War II slide further back in history it becomes even more important to remind ourselves what happened. It should not be forgotten.


Eli Wiesel

In fact Mr Wiesel states he wrote his memoir for that very purpose. For me it is essential reading for everyone. The most important one hundred pages you might ever read. If you only read one Holocaust account then make sure its this one. Thank you!

I’ve been meaning to read Night for years and finally picked it up shortly after hearing about Eli Wiesel’s death. Night is not a book that I can review. It defies critique, and even analyzing it from my sunny porch with a cup of coffee, feels wrong. Yet it’s the reasons that Night belongs outside of criticism that make it so important.

There is the Holocaust and then there is the world’s relationship with the Holocaust. By the end of the 60s that relationship encompassed adult children of survivors, scholars, deniers, apologists, voyeurs, and people who hold their ears the moment the subject comes up.

Night was written before any of that. It isn’t influenced by other Holocaust literature; instead it is a foundational text, unvarnished source material describing one of most terrible things our species ever did. For that reason, I believe it should be required reading for everyone.

Night is short and the writing is simple. It feels stark, honest, and hallowed in the way of powerful memorials. In the preface of my edition, Wiesel writes:

“There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don’t 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. …I knew that I must bear witness.

Wiesel was a brilliant light in the darkness he depicts so powerfully. His obit in the New York Times, puts it well, “There may have been better chroniclers who evoked the hellish minutiae of the German death machine. There were arguably more illuminating philosophers. But no single figure was able to combine Mr. Wiesel’s moral urgency with his magnetism, which emanated from his deeply lined face and eyes as unrelievable melancholy.”

When I started this review I was going to post a famous photo of him as part of a group of emaciated prisoners on the day that Buchenwald was liberated. But after reading that beautiful quote, I would rather close with this photo of the day he won the Nobel Peace Prize, which illustrates the knowledge he gave the world rather than the darkness he endured.

When I read books like these, I realize the truth behind Elie Wiesel’s impactful words about God’s promises. He states that he did not know about God & the fulfilment of his promises, but he knew that Satan has always fulfilled all his promises to mankind.

That is why he ‘fashioned’ an Adolf Hitler into this world, who is even now being reincarnated in multiple forms not only in mainstream society but also in the private lives of individuals. That is why 6 million innocent Jews died miserably many decades ago & now their very existence is being questioned & hotly debated upon worldwide. That is why a believer of the Talmud like Wiesel lost his God somewhere in those death camps as he hankered after bowls of thin soup & chewed upon snow when there was no water in sight.

I know people love to read ‘happy books’ with ‘happy endings’ & ‘happy characters’ & on ‘happy themes’, but to be truthful, we are deluding ourselves by doing this. By reading only ‘happy books’, we are crushing underfoot many aspects of our sorrowful & wretched reality, which could have been resolved if we also read books that gave us a message & which need not necessarily have been comforting. ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel is one such memoir that is not comforting, but it is representative of what was, & more importantly, of what can be. It is an important book for humanity & a testament about the indifference the world showed to the European Jewish community during a time not unlike our present.

Anyone of us for the flimsiest reason can land up in a present or future concentration camp. The Jews of the Holocaust were not the last community of individuals to face this reality, there have been more, & there will be more, unless we start facing reality & our own inner demons.

You don’t have to go & take on Satan in a mortal war combat, just first try facing your own reality & maybe if you succeed there, you will succeed elsewhere. You can start of by reading this book based on reality – which plainly states that the opposite of love is indeed not ‘hate’ but ‘indifference’. I do not care about what Wiesel’s life was like after he was liberated & that will not affect my opinion about this book. It is an impactful book, a must read, simple to understand, historically accurate & well written. That is all that I’m concerned with.

“Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.”

My first reading of Elie Wiesel's Night occurred during this year's Holocaust Memorial Day.


Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.

Words cannot begin to comprehend the plight of suffering and cruelty revealed in this book that had me on the verge of breaking into sobs page after page, so I'll let the writing speak for itself by sharing moments and passages that cannot be forgotten in time:



This here is exactly why I refuse to participate with anything regarding Germany; the world is complicit in its indifference.  “...my hatred remains our only link today.”



It pained me beyond words to see my people fall under the “this surely won’t happen to me” spell.



And the effect spreads like a snowball, gathering more and more edicts as the days go by.



Nothing gets my blood boiling quite like seeing the numerous acts of silence committed by these citizens. People love to victim-blame the Jews by asking the distasteful question of why they didn't stand up to the oppressor... But a more pressing notion, for me, is why those German citizens, watching idly by in the face of atrocity, didn't stand up to their fellow Nazis… 



I was appalled from start to finish with the above. Not only do they watch idly by from a short distance away, but to then FLIRT with them…

You think you've reached the peak of cruelty, but then you read on:



Experiencing numbness in order to remain sane at the sight of tragedy.



This French girl's wisdom has stayed in mind, in particular, because the next paragraph describes an out-of-this-world experience wherein Elie Wiesel stumbles upon her eons later:



But the most painful of all remains to be the relationship portrayed between father and son that keeps both alive in the face of inhumanity.



Many more sorrowful revelations are shared within the pages of this must-read. Elie Wiesel's raw written voice commemorates all that must never be forgotten.



My arms gathered with goosebumps at that because the date I was reading this book was April 11th.

I'll end this review by sharing my favorite Elie Wiesel quote:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

n  n

Support creators you love. Buy a Coffee for nat (bookspoils) with Ko-fi.com/bookspoils
n  n

This review and more can be found on my blog.

2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. And yet, over 6 million Jews murdered and 75 years later- the Holocaust is still going on.

Those who remember the atrocities of Auschwitz are diminishing, and a resurgence of hate is beginning.
We have already seen history repeating itself. Anti-semitism, islamophobia, xenophobia and other hate fuelled acts of violence and discrimination are contemporary issues. From the mass-genocide of Rwanda in 1994 to recent concerns over the treatment of dissidents in North Korea, it is evident that the battle is not yet over.

“As long as one dissident is in prison, out freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them. That when their voices are stifled we shall lend them outs, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs."

This may not have been the most well written, eloquent or technically superior piece of literature to exist, but it held within its unflinching and direct words, the ability to make me question myself, and humanity as a whole. The unembellished words added to reality and tangibility of the account.
This is real. This happened. It was like a repeating mantra in my head. I had to constantly remind myself, because when confronted with such a harrowing truth, the mind tends to shy away.

The physical horrors this book described were by no stretch abhorrent and grim- but what affected me the most were the psychological effects. As the author himself said in the prologue

“Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was”

However, this book placed me in his mind for a mere 120 pages, and made me understand a whole new layer of human suffering. To see how a boy’s mind was twisted into celebrating at his father’s death was harrowing and confronting. It prompted questions that are uncomfortable to answer. What would I do? How can someone become so desperate they would murder their own father for a loaf of bread? How did they degrade people to level where they had only their primal and animalistic instincts to rely upon? How did they justify that to themselves? How would I justify that to myself? I like to to think that I could never, but if this book shows one thing it is the deepest, darkest depths of humanity we like to hide from not only others, but ourselves.

It is essential that not only do we remember history, but we learn from it. Hopefully then, even after the last survivor has passed away- their lives, memories and experiences will not be forgotten. We need to stop this from becoming a perpetual cycle of hate.
We cannot stay silent.
We need to remember.

“For the youth of today, for the children of tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future” - Ellie Wiesel

here is a link to article, written by a teenage girl speaking about the importance of remembering the Holocaust- as it profoundly impacted me and the writing of this review.
https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment...

This was a short and painful book to read, seeing the bright optimistic boy in the heart of his family in Hungary transform into a lone skeleton in Buchenwald was traumatizing. While I appreciated this account, it was quite abbreviated and I preferred Primo Levi’s account for its poetry. Nonetheless, Wiesel’s account is equally terrifying and very moving.

In terms of historical context, the Nazis started deporting Hungarian Jews late in the war, when it was clearly a losing cause because despite losing the war, they still obstinately wanted to eliminate a maximum of Jews and Hungary had the second greatest population of Jews in Europe after Poland. Elie Wiesel and his family were deported and sent directly to Auschwitz. He stayed with his father until the Liberation (his mother and sister being gassed immediately on arrival to Birkenau) at the Buna plant, the same place where Primo Levy was held. He was among the prisoners on the Death March in January 1945 to Buchenwald in Germany. His father did not survive the march.

Fino's Reviews of Books about the Holocaust
Nonfiction:
If This Is A Man/The Truce by Primo Levy
The Periodic Table by Primo Levy
The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levy
The Night by Elie Wiesel
Auschwitz by Laurence Rees
Fiction:
The Tatooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris
Travel to Krakow to visit Auschwitz:
Krakow:City Guide [Blue Guides]

Se leggere è commuovente, immedesimarsi è straziante.

Ma come si fa a leggere testimonianze simili e rimanere distaccati?



”Dietro di me udii il solito uomo domandare: - Dov’è dunque Dio?
E io sentivo in me una voce che gli rispondeva: - Dov’è? Eccolo: è appeso lì, a quella forca...
Quella sera la zuppa aveva un sapore di cadavere.”


Elizer Wiese è un ragazzino.
Strappato da una piccola città della Transilvania dove le giornate avevano come ostacolo massimo quello di risolvere un enigma talmudico e scaraventato in una folla di corpi che non sono più parte del suo popolo ma ostacoli nella corsa per la sopravvivenza.

E una domanda ricorre martellante:
Dio dov'è?



” Mai dimenticherò quella notte, la prima notte nel campo, che ha fatto della mia vita una lunga notte e per sette volte sprangata.
Mai dimenticherò quel fumo.
Mai dimenticherò i piccoli volti dei bambini di cui avevo visto i corpi trasformarsi in volute di fumo sotto un cielo muto.
Mai dimenticherò quelle fiamme che consumarono per sempre la mia Fede.
Mai dimenticherò quel silenzio notturno che mi ha tolto per l’eternità il desiderio di vivere.
Mai dimenticherò quegli istanti che assassinarono il mio Dio e la mia anima, e i miei sogni, che presero il volto del deserto.
Mai dimenticherò tutto ciò, anche se fossi condannato a vivere quanto Dio stesso.
Mai.”



”Sia benedetto il Nome dell’Eterno!
Migliaia di bocche ripetevano la benedizione, si piegavano come alberi nella tempesta.
- Sia benedetto il Nome dell’Eterno!
Ma perché, ma perché benedirLo? Tutte le mie fibre si rivoltavano. Per aver fatto bruciare migliaia di bambini nelle fosse? Per aver fatto funzionare sei crematori giorno e notte, anche di sabato e nei giorni di festa? Per aver creato nella sua grande potenza Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna e tante altre fabbriche di morte? Come avrei potuto dirGli: Benedetto Tu sia o Signore, Re dell’Universo, che ci hai eletto fra i popoli per venir torturati giorno e notte, per vedere i nostri padri, le nostre madri, i nostri fratelli finire al crematorio? Sia lodato il Tuo Santo Nome, Tu che ci hai scelto per essere sgozzati sul Tuo altare?”

Quando si rimane senza parole si rimane anche senza stelline....

You can't critique this book. You can like it, you can dislike it, but you can't reason out why. That would be an insult to the memory of this horrific time, and an insult to the man who lived through it and chose to cry out to the world against it. The most you can do is read it, and take away something from it. You can never fully understand the emotions this book encompasses, for the price of understanding is death, if not of the physical than of the mental. Read it, and know that this was not some nightmare in a fevered brain; this once upon a time was reality, and in many ways still is, and it is up to us to learn from the past in order to better the future.