What can I say about this book that hasn't been said better by Wiesel himself? Powerful and moving. My copy has his 1986 Nobel Acceptance Speech at the end, and there is so much there that applies to this moment in our history that it's eerie.

holy shit, this book

139th book of 2020.

This book stings like the cold. In fact, the cover of my edition is what it feels like; I can feel that ice in the pit of my stomach after reading some of the descriptions here... Descriptions that Wiesel writes almost flippantly. I will be quoting some, and they are not pleasant to read: you are warned.

Wiesel was just a boy when he was sent to Auschwitz. It's hard to imagine that his entire experience is captured in 115 pages. It wasn't always that way - his first manuscript was 900 pages long; that has been distilled to this. The writing is hard to describe: sparse? Deft? Minimalist? Wiesel put it quite well when Orson Welles expressed interest in turning it into a movie: Wiesel believed that a movie would fail because it would be made without the silences between his words. Most of the book he is with his father. When the camp is liberated in 1945, Wiesel is 16 years old.
n  

Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes...children thrown into the flames. (Is it a wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)

n
He said about his book, "In Night, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night." In just 115 pages he manages to begin with his life before, briefly, the creation of the ghettos, the arriving at Auschwitz, his time there, his own feelings and there is quite the discussion into the "death of God" through his eyes, as he suggests in the above quote. Though for a time Wiesel toys with the idea of God and providence.
n  

I had new shoes myself. But as they were covered with a thick coat of mud, they had not been noticed. I thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wondrous universe.

n
The language is deceptively simple. There is a certain silence to it, as he comments on too. He uses many ellipses throughout the book, which I don't tend to like in books, but they work here. The reason the language is so empty at times is what makes it echo so hauntingly.
n  

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

n
Elie Wiesel received a Nobel Peace Prize in his life. He died in 2016. Utah senator Orrin Hatch said this, "With Elie's passing, we have lost a beacon of humanity and hope. We have lost a hero of human rights and a luminary of Holocaust literature." A luminary is a beautiful choice of words. We can hope with literature like Wiesel's and Primo Levi's, we can continue to learn about the Holocaust to ensure that it never happens again. However, in 2018, two years after Wiesel's death, antisemitic graffiti was found on the house he was born in. So, we ask ourselves, what have we truly learnt since 1945?

This book is a hard, righteous slap in the conscience to everyone of good will in the world and should stand as a stark reminder of both: (1) the almost unimaginable brutality that we, as a species, are capable of; and (2) that when it comes to preventing or stopping similar kinds of atrocities or punishing those that seek to perpetrate such crimes, WE ARE OUR BROTHERS' KEEPERS and must take responsibility for what occurs "on our watch."

This remarkable story is the powerful and deeply moving account of Ellie Wiesel's personal experiences as a Hungarian Jew who is sent with his entire family to the infamous Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and later Buchenwald. The most chilling aspect of the narrative for me was the calm, casual way that so many of the nightmarish events that Elie witnesses were performed. For example, early on in the account, Elie is separated from his Mother and sisters (never to see them again). This life-altering, traumatically painful action is done so quickly and in such an off-handed, bureaucratic manner by the Nazis that trying to grasp the reality of it made me physically sick.

That was only the beginning. Elie goes on to chronicle his subsequent attempts not to be separated from his father and the horrors he was forced to witness and endure. Along the road of this terrifying journey, we hear in Elie's own words of the growing disgust of his 13 year old self for both mankind and for God and how he eventually lost completely his own humanity in his resolve to do whatever he had to in order to stay alive.

Written in a simple, unsentimental style (which makes the horrors described seem somehow more shocking), this is one of those important life-changing books that I believe everyone should read.

HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!

The author didn't bother with useless filler in this telling of his experience during the Holocaust. He went straight to the point... and the point is horrifying. It's stories like this that need to be remembered if humankind ever has a hope to evolve beyond our tendencies to war, murder and hatred.

Everyone was talking about this book. Just consumed it…Now I grasp mentally what this night was. The title of this book is Night. And the story that follows is also as dark as a night.
A pitch-dark night!

And when I conclude the book, I recall a few lines of Octavio Paz, at the beginning of the review.

Lightning or fishes
In the night of the sea
And bird lightning
In the forest night
Our bones are lightening
In the night of the flesh
O world! All is night
Life is the lightening

The problem is that the story inside the title night is real, rather than fictional and this is the biggest plight. The anguish and horror in this book are not just of suffering, arising out of one person Eliezer. It is a universal pain. This book is a very intimate, firsthand account of a survivor’s perspective that was recorded in his memory permanently, inside the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

In the book, those horrifying events, which are narrated from the viewpoint of a teenage boy who suffered personal losses, seem mostly true to the core and it is very scary. It’s really petrifying and I can’t imagine someone had done such things to human beings. A bunch of human beings treating another bunch of humans like animals, like lifeless stuff, filling them into a cattle car and jostling them hard like mules. Not leaving even infants. Horrible!

“Without passion or hate prisoners were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their neck. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns.”

I know well enough of Holocaust. But this is my first try of any such intimate account on it. This year I have already begun many other books revolving around WWII and Nazi stuff. And with this one, it’s a ghastly opening, very grim emotions it has produced in me.

While the book is about a very heinous and unfortunate historical wrongdoing, a shame on human civilization, the author has made an extremely legible piece of work for the general reader, the original manuscript was written in Yiddish, and is translated quite well in English.

The book also shows the writerly craft of the author where he has been able to bring on the tender and heart touching emotions between the characters with regard to friendships and father-son relations.

“While forced to do work under various kommandos, boys from different places came together and quickly became friends. They knew countless Hebrew songs and so we would sometimes hum melodies about walking the gentle waters of the Jordan River and the Majestic sanctity of Jerusalem.”

The boy is very possessive of his father and wishes to keep himself with him all the time, even in the time of death. He just wants to be close to his father irrespective of whatever happens next.

“I ran to look for my father he was leaning against the wall bent shoulders sagging as if under a heavy load. I went up to him took his hand and kissed it I felt a tear on my hand. Whose was it? Mine? His? I said nothing. Nor did he. Never before had we understood each other so clearly.”

A young boy inside the concentration camp asks his friend that his turn is next and now he will be dead in a few days and thus he counts his days.

“In three days I will be gone, say Kaddish for me.
We promised: in three days when we would see the smoke rising from the chimney we would think of him. We would gather ten men and hold special service. All his friends would say Kaddish.”

The power of Weisel’s story and its engaging narration has taken me aback, how clearly he has overpowered me as a reader, through his very intense storytelling artistry of a very personal account of his life.

One of the most important things that I kept on noticing everywhere is the numinous undertone in the dialogues between the characters. It divulges the spiritual aspect of whatever happened with his life. An incorporeal elucidation!

This book raises many questions, most of them remain unanswered.

“He explained to me with great emphasis, that every question possesses a power that was lost in the answer…”

there are simply no words which i could write that would do this book the justice it deserves. i am speechless.

n  5 starsn

I have a feeling this may be in my favourite books of 2016 list! Undoubtedly one of the best non-fiction books I have read in my life.

Elie Wiesel retells how he lived through three years at Auschwitz concentration camp during Hitler's reign in World War Two. At only fifteen years old Elie and his family were wrenched from their home in Hungry and moved to the horrors of Hitler's camps. We see through Elie's eyes as he loses his family and is forced to live in the most horrendous conditions. Though it all he somehow manages to hold his faith - I can't express the pain that Elie conveys in this book, it honestly broke my heart. I find it so hard to read these kinds of books, the things that he recounts are truly shocking. I have such a strong belief that events like this need to be remembered, so we don't end up falling in the same traps.

A harrowing and heart-wrenching read. For such a short book it seriously packs a punch and I honestly believe this should be required reading for everyone. Phenomenal.

The author, who is actually in the above picture, said it best in the forward; “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was.” I think we can all agree with that. But can we, the reader, even understand what happened there? Can modern men and women comprehend that cursed universe?

I’m not entirely sure.

I first read this in my eighth grade History class. I was 13. It changed my life. Before this book my world was sunshine and rainbows. My biggest concern was whether or not a boy named Jason liked me back. I got mad at my mom when she made me go to bed on time, I complained if I didn’t like what we were having for dinner and I argued about what I was and wasn’t allowed to watch on TV.

I thought I knew about WWII. Both of my grandfathers served in it and so my parents wanted to make sure that we understood the sacrifices they made, the things they saw. I watched documentaries about it with my father, the history nerd, listened to the few stories that my grandfathers would tell, but up until that point I had been intentionally sheltered from the horrors of the holocaust. I had only been told in the vaguest terms what had happened, that so many millions of people had been killed, that Hitler and his men had sought to exterminate the Jewish people. My parents wanted to spare me from what exactly that meant until they thought I was mature enough to be able to absorb it.

But then I read this.

And for the first time in my life I was completely self-aware. I felt like a child, like a complete and utter fool. For what were my “problems” compared to those of this narrator? How “hard” was my life compared to what he endured? What millions of people similarly endured? I now understood my own insignificance in the grand scheme of things and suddenly the reality of the world was a crushing weight. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It was dark. It was ugly and unforgiveable.

I remember getting really angry when I finished this. Mostly I was angry at the world and at humanity as a whole but I unfairly turned some of that on my father. After all, he hadn’t prepared me for what I found in this book. At one point I even demanded that he explain this…thing to me.

He couldn’t.

Fifteen years later, my second read of this book has impacted me just as much as the first. There’s this question I kept asking myself while reading. That question, was ‘How?’. I’m sure that ‘Why?’ might seem the more obvious choice here but I couldn’t let myself wander down the rabbit warren that is that question. Madness lies at the end of it. So I’m left with ‘How?’. How did this happen? How did so many average human beings contribute to this?

How did the SS working in the camps reach the point that they were physically and mentally able to toss live infants into flames?

How were the German girls that lived within smelling distance of Auschwitz able to pass love notes to the soldiers that marched their skeletal prisoners past?

How did these same starving prisoners manage to run 20 kilometers in the freezing snow?

How could the SS officers that shot them if they stopped on the first day of their death march then shout encouragements to them the next?

How could the German citizens near the train tracks throw bread into the prisoners’ cattle cars just to watch them murder each other for it?

How could human beings do these things to each other?

How?

HOW?

n  HOW???n

Like my father, I have no answers.

And that, I believe, is why many modern humans will never really be able to comprehend the things that happen in this book. Absorb it, yes. Bear witness to it, yes. Understand it? Hopefully never.

I finished this at lunch today. And now I’m sitting in my cubicle, glancing at my neighbors and wondering if they’re capable of this kind of depravity. Am I? What would I do to survive? Would I beat my own father to death for the bread in his hand? I hope to God that none of us will ever have to find out the answers to these questions.

If you read a single book in your life, this should be it.

Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest

The important thing here is not to confuse this with Twilight, which is a totally different thing.

Night is the most crucial of the books I've read about the Holocaust. It's spare and unflinching and deadly. Wiesel never pulls a punch or writes an extra word. I read it as part of a Holocaust segment (I know, I know), including The Diary of a Young Girl, Comedy in a Minor Key and This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The latter two are terrific books in their own right. Comedy is a smaller, different sort of story, and This Way for the Gas is more savage and audacious.

It's maybe a little fashionable to like these more, because they're more literary. Wiesel is more apt to just state what happened, clearly and simply. Here's a book about what happened during the Holocaust. That makes it, for me, the definitive work about the Holocaust. There are other great books too, but this is the first one.

Little bit of a bummer though.

n  “Having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival”n

As a first person memoir of Holocaust survival, NIGHT is powerful. But it isn’t unique and it isn’t any more compelling than any number of similar stories. It isn’t any uglier or more graphic. It doesn’t demonstrate the evil of anti-Semitism and Hitler’s Final Solution to any greater extent than any number of other memoirs and novels in a genre that is very, very crowded with heartbreaking tales of privation, despair, suffering and death. In fact, for a modern reader analyzing Wiesel’s memoir with the benefit of hindsight, the most shocking detail of NIGHT is the banal, unblinking acceptance of the creeping escalation of events – from police and military observation, through segregation and ghettoes, to concentration camps, pogroms and outright genocidal slaughter – the failure of the Jews to do anything at all save placing their lives in the hands of fate. Their hope was only that what was happening was not really happening and that the clear light of tomorrow’s day would be better. For millions of Jews, we know that tomorrow never arrived.

In the preface to this particular edition, Wiesel characterized himself as “ … 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.”

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he took those thoughts even further. “Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?”

He made his life purpose explicit and crystal clear, “I have tried to keep memory alive, … I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”

He unflinchingly pointed out to his audience and to the listening world that human rights are being violated on every continent. Nor did he hesitate to provide specific examples – Apartheid and Nelson Mandela’s interminable imprisonment; the denial of Poland's Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa’s right to dissent; racism and political persecution in Chile and Ethiopia; and, rather tellingly, the continuing violence in Palestine and the Gaza Strip.

If that speech were written and delivered today, there is absolutely zero possibility that Wiesel would have failed to make a specific reference to Trump’s animosity to Black Lives Matter or to his explicitly racist anti-Hispanic and anti-Islamic immigration policies. The direct comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump’s ascendancy to power and his Republican government’s attempts to install a theocratic authoritarian neo-Nazi Fourth Reich are too obvious and too numerous for any rational observer to miss. And Wiesel was a rational observer.

Elie Wiesel passed away in 2016 precisely four months before the American people chose to place this dangerous man in power and to enable him with a Republican majority in the US Senate. His question, “How could the world remain silent?” is more poignant, more important and more timely than ever. But, if I may say so, the Jewish diaspora and the state of Israel have deafened the world with their silence. If any single identifiable group of people in the world should be filling the ether with screams of protest, it should be the Jews. It isn’t so. Benjamin Netanyahu’s, the Knesset’s and the state of Israel’s oppression and warlike opposition to the Palestinian right to statehood and self-determination continues unabated. The Jewish population of the USA are sitting quietly on their hands as Trump tightens his grip on power.

In a short, sad, single sentence, Elie Wiesel’s authorship of NIGHT “to give some meaning to [his] survival” appears to have been a failure. The world is not listening.

Paul Weiss

This is a true account of Elie Wiesel, a 15-year old Romanian Jew. At the beginning of the book, Wiesel’s religious leader warns him of the danger, but no one listens. The family is confident that everything will be alright. However, the Germans march in without even a fight. Overnight, regulations go into effect including wearing of the yellow star. Eventually, the Jews are forced into a ghetto. Then, they are told to move. Where they were going, no one knew. They were herded into a cattle car, bound for the concentration camps. What will happen to Wiesel and his family?

Night is a case where truth is stranger than fiction. It would be hard to imagine a scenario more gruesome. In the book, you can tell that Wiesel has deep regrets about choices that were made along the way. You can feel the weight, the burden on his shoulders, even though he was only an innocent teenage boy in an impossible situation.

This book was a sucker punch to the solar plexus. Even in the midst of unspeakable atrocities, there was so much hope. When arriving at Auschwitz, there was a discussion about trying to escape, “Let the world learn about the existence of Auschwitz. Let everybody find out about it while they still have a chance to escape.” The sad thing is that there were people who knew and did little to nothing to help.

However, I don’t want to diminish many of the brave people who risked their lives for the greater good. Before the pandemic, I was visiting the Canadian Aviation Museum, and they had a display about Operation Bad Penny/Operation Manna/Operation Chowhound. Operation Bad Penny consisted of a crew of seven men, five from Ontario, Canada, who dropped food into Netherlands to prevent the people from starving. The Germans had not yet agreed to the cease fire for the humanitarian mission so this test flight was to see if they would be shot down. They were not. This began 3,301 food drops. The Dutch people spelled out, “Many Thanks” in tulips. One of the people interrupted the tour. In a small, quavering voice, she said, “That was my grandparents. I’m from The Netherlands. They were dying, and the British, Americans, and Canadians saved them. I wouldn’t be alive except for this flight. That is why anytime, we have visitors from these areas, we were always told to say, ‘Welcome back.’”

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

Connect With Me!
Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta My Bookstore at Pango