Infinitely sad. A book everyone should read.

RIP Elie Wiesel.

Auschwitz was liberated 75 years ago, during my father's lifetime. It really could happen again, any place, any time. Humanity has it in them, it just needs the right conditions to grow.
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"I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy."

These words and this book just tore at my heart. I have seen Night, have heard of Night for many years now. I waited to read it, unsure what I could possibly gain from reading another account of the evil existing among our fellow human beings – I will become enraged and depressed. I can’t change history. I will be forced to examine my own faith and I don’t want to do that. But then I discovered that my son was assigned this book as part of his summer reading for a high school English class. What do I want him to learn from this book, from this dark piece of our not too distant past? Should he pass it by so that he doesn’t have to experience the horrifying details, feel the terrible injustice in this world? No. I do not want him to be a passive bystander. I want him to understand that narrow-mindedness, hatred and bigotry exist despite his fortunate and protected upbringing. Other human beings are right now suffering unimaginable sorrow, are being cruelly maltreated. History does repeat itself, perhaps with varying backgrounds, different groups of individuals. We can’t let this happen. My son needs to read this book. His children need to read this book someday. I need to read this book. I did. I read this book and I cried. I was angry. I was disgusted with humanity. I understood Elie’s words above, why he felt such despair. Everyone should read this book at least once. This is a slim book with a tremendous message.

"Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere."

Wow this book..can't express the feelings during my reading of this, so enthralling, captivating but oh the horrors! Unimaginable horrors. Tore my heart out into a million pieces. I regret not having read this earlier, this is a true account of Elie Wiesel as a young Jewish boy who has no foreseeable knowledge and understanding of what was around the corner when his family are forced to flee from their home in Romania, and the unknown horrors that awaited them. Even though I've read and have studied many of these stories of the Holocaust and of the concentration camps in Auschwitz, I was still surprised how shocked I was by the atrocities and how it was written made me shed so many more tears and emotions that I didn't know could still exist. This book is a must read and deserves it's nobel peace prize. I felt so connected to the story and to Elie that I had trouble sleeping. What a tragedy it is to have lost this true humanitarian treasure last year and will forever be grateful that this book and others like this exist. Thank you sir I hope you find your peace in heaven and find your family again. 5 tear soaked stars

For such a short novel, just over 100 pages, there's a lot packed in here. A lot of sadness, which is to be expected. I only wish I could have found out more about Wiesel's family and what happened to his mother and sisters. Did they survive Auschwitz? Other than that, this is an important novel that everyone should read. I'm only upset I didn't read it sooner, perhaps in Middle School, when everyone seemed to be reading Night.

Can't wait to read this.

I had put off reading this story for a variety of reasons, main among them that I knew what I would be facing, and was eager to find an excuse not to. After having been to the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany, the images of the now-dead ovens still linger somewhere in the recesses of my mind, and to back to it, to read from someone who went through it, was not something I readily wanted to do. But I did; I gathered myself up and read through in a couple of days, the end of the book taking me by surprise, so engrossed I was. I was stoic as I read; no emotion showed on my face, and most of the time I read while alone. Inside, however, it was very different.

The world that Wiesel conjures is not a make-believe land, but an echo of the world he lived in, the world he saw destroyed. The experiences he writes about come not from research in books, but from scars in his skin and soul. At times all I wanted to do was to put the book down and never go back, but that would be a gross disservice to all those who went through the fires of Hell and never came back, perhaps even more so to those who did and still bear the scars and carry the torch, crying to the world to Never Forget. At the core, Night is an intensely personal story, one you do not have to be Jewish to understand. Being Jewish helps, though, and makes the story incredibly relevant and compelling. Because as you read all the horrors undergone, you always remember that you are Jewish, that you are one of those they targeted, one of those put into the camps, one of those whom, when the next Hitler comes, will be at risk.

I can understand why Wiesel says that, after all the books he has written, Night still holds a special place in his heart and soul; it is probably the same place in which he carved a niche for the story in the heart of every reader.

"Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately." - Elie Wiesel

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Night. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.

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By now, almost everyone has read this book, but if you haven't, I will start by encouraging you to read this version, a Marion Wiesel (Elie's wife) translation. The author seems to be pleased with this translation, the other, he thought "seemed alright." His wife knows how to "transmit" his voice better, Wiesel wrote in this introduction, and because of this and her editing, he was able to revise important details. I saw how important spouses who play the roles of editors and translators are to writers, when I read Stacy Schiff's biography of Nabokov's wife, Vera, so with this introduction, I was reminded of how great translation and editing can transform a literary piece. This book was written in Yiddish, translated first into French, and then English, and later was "rejected by every major publisher, French and American."
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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, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

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I read this and couldn't help but think that as he wrote this, Wiesel was doing both.

Gloom and misery. Brief blasts of horror on the page. Terror-stricken scenes. Mood that chills. Pained and reflective voice that finds distance from trauma, the type of distance necessary to tell such a story. The style of the book mirrors the indescribable events it depicts. Night is war and war is night. And the memory of war is as replete as it is fragmentary, as lucid as it is obscure. The days resembled the nights, and the nights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness. A writer takes too long dwelling on these scenes and he alienates his readers. This writer did not. This style, this structure - this works.

The angle of the story is also appealing: a teenage son who finds the roles reversed when he has to take care of his ailing father. There is only so much one can say about this book. On second thought, there are lots one can say about this book, like the encouraging notion that books like this are meant to be written and read so that wars and their travesties are not erased from the chalkboard of history; however, one needs not go into all those details, one simply needs to point to an excerpt which says it all:

n  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.n

An amazing and sad story. Dark, gritty, and personal account of the holocaust that gives the reader a chance to really feel the hunger, weariness, and sorrow. Maybe it is not a book for everyone because the content deals with the harsh realities of WWII.

To bear witness to a crime so pervasive is to see the abyss...it stares back at you, through your soul, making you question if there is a bottom to the depth of the depravity of mankind. To be able to find light again is amazing - truly one of the most important books on loss and gain we all must weigh and balance - highest recommendation.

n  "Why did I write it? 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?"n

The second Holocaust account I read this year is from an author who was a teenager when he was in camp, and who then turned first journalist and then writer. The other was 'Fateless' by another Nobel laureate Imre Kertész.

The less you know about before starting the book, the better. In fact, the only reason I'm writing this ... I won't call it 'review'; is to warn people to read the main text first. Do read the two introductions - the one by author and the one by another Nobel laureate from literature, François Mauriac,who helped Wiesel publish the book.
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"... in Aden. Our ship's passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the “na- tives,” who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I im- plored the lady: “Please, don't throw any more coins!” “Why not?” said she. “I like to give charity…” n

If Anne Frank was 13 when Germans came to Netherlands, Elie Wiessel was 15 when the same thing happened in Romania. Two teenage children who saw the atrocities of the German armies who were blinded by their loyalty to Hitler. There were a few differences: Anne Frank died in the concentration camp while Elie Wiessel survived. Anne Frank's diary, first published as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1950, was written in young girl's language while she was on a hiding while Night by Elie Wiesel tells the experience of a 15-y/o boy inside the concentration camps told later in the language of a 30-y/o man. Of course, I am not expecting Wiesel to do ala Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes, winning the Pulitzer and later be hounded by controversy that what he told in the story were exaggerated if not untrue. Reading Night was still a haunting and extremely sad experience for me just like any other holocaust novels that I've read so far. I just thought that it would have been more gripping if Wiesel put more meat in his descriptions of the locales in the same manner as what Imre Kertezs (another Holocaust survivor) did in his Fatelessness and of course, Thomas Kennealy (he is a writer only) in Schindler's List. They are just too many books on Holocaust now and these are just the 4 among the more "famous" ones but my heart still cries buckets of tears while reading them.

Critiquing a well-loved book like this is like blasphemy. I just feel like I am doing the 6 million Jews who perished in that horrendous shameless genocide an injustice if I say something about any literature depicting what they went through.

What they went through has marked a permanent etch in our collective psyche. Their stories need to be told to and read by all the future generations. I hope that this generation and all the next ones will remember the Holocaust and learn the lesson from it. Saying these things is almost like a cliche since it is just stating the obvious from a well-known fact.

This sounds like a beauty-pageant-kind-of-question but if I were given a chance to talk to one famous living person, I would choose Elie Wiesel. I will ask him what exactly he was thinking in that scene when the young boy with angel's sad face was hanged. He was looking at the boy, who because he weighted light (being a boy), did not die right away but hanged there still breathing for few hours. Somebody at the back said: "Where is God? Where is God now?" The 15-y/o Wiesel said: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows." I know that he lost faith in God, but later in the scene when there was another "selection" he cried out to God again. I would like to know how he was able to switch back his faith despite what he was experiencing in the camp. What is it that make us believers cling on to God despite being all the hopelessness and desperation that we all go through at times?

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Elie Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom. 7th guy from the left

Oh, I have other questions but I hate long reviews. Primo Levi is next.