Winner of Nobel peace prize, Elie Wiesel writes about his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. The book was originally written in French but has been sensitively translated into English by his wife Marion. There is a preface to new translation by Wiesel and at the end is his Nobel prize acceptance speech. Within just 120 pages he has managed to share his trauma and conflict with his own beliefs in a manner that shakes the reader to his core. This slim book is a must read for all so that humanity does not face this indignity any more. The book also is a testimony to the truth and so in that sense is a terrifying documentation of period in history when humanity stooped so low!

Night is perhaps one of the most remarkable, harrowing and haunting accounts of the events in the Nazi Germany concentration camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I read this powerful work only a few days before news of the author's, Elie Wiesel's, death were announced, and both shocked me. The first, because unless you have experienced it for yourself, you will never be able to realize the full extent of what happened in the Second World War with all its different facets and emotions, and the latter, because with Elie Wiesel, a remarkable man has left this planet who fought for memorizing the Holocaust, who fought against violence, suppression and racism.

Perhaps you will not find the most eloquent, the most artful language in this work of literature, but that's nothing you should expect to find in a book dealing with something as frightening, as horrifying, as real as the Holocaust. In his nonfictional book, Elie Wiesel writes about his own survival in the concentration camps, about reflections of the father-son relationship with his father, about humanity and inhumanity. It's a book everyone should read, because ultimately, the Second World War is something everyone should remember. Forgetting would be the worst way to deal with it.

A lot of people, more people than would be good, claim that it has all been "so long ago", is so completely irrelevant nowadays, just belongs to this boring stuff people are tortured with in school because it belongs to this dry nonsense called "history". I usually don't tell people they're wrong ... usually. Because in this case, they can't be more wrong. The Holocaust needs to be remembered, because if humans forget the mistakes they did, they will tend to repeat them. And I think everyone can agree that the Holocaust should never, never be repeated.

This is a book which is incredibly difficult to review, just like it is difficult to read - not for its language or its style; I read it in one sitting in the course of three or four hours - but rather for the horrifying events Elie Wiesel talks about. I can only recommend to read this book to everyone, independent from how much you already know about the topic.

And on a final note: Rest in Peace, Elie Wiesel.

“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it.”

I first read Night in 8th grade, and its raw honesty fractured something inside me that has never quite healed. In college, when my backpack and I traveled through Europe, I tried to ignore the dysentery I'd acquired in Egypt and resolutely hopped a bus from Munich to Dachau. I had to see the WW2 concentration camps of my (and everyone's) nightmares firsthand. Dachau was just as awful and life-changing as I'd expected, walking among the ghosts, and on the ashes, of those like Elie Wiesel who lived and died in such horrific conditions.

Rereading Night this week, I could not ignore how dispassionately this man had to report his experience, since what he endured must have felt as if it were happening to someone else, like an unreal nightmare. Just like how a soft talker forces you to lean in to listen more carefully, Elie Wiesel's startlingly matter-of-fact portrayal of his personal horrors draws you even further into his memories of the massive evil that was the Holocaust.

This is one of those books you have to yield to, you must endure, because as a human being you hold the responsibility of understanding mankind's history in order to prevent the same atrocities from happening again. It's such a small price to pay, to suffer through a short memoir such as this, compared to the ultimate sacrifice millions of innocent Jews, Soviets, homosexuals and more paid back in the 1940s.

"If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one." Elie Wiesel

"[Yossi and Tibi] quickly became my friends. Having once belonged to a Zionist youth organization, they knew countless Hebrew songs. And so we would sometimes hum melodies evoking the gentle waters of the Jordan River and the majestic sanctity of Jerusalem. We also spoke often about Palestine." (p. 68)

Auschwitz survivors and world leaders mark 80 years since Nazi death camp’s liberation, which took place on 27 January 1945. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/au...

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 those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.


I picked up this book from the library just because it was short, and I wanted a short and easy read. I've never heard of it before, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And oh boy, this book was anything but an easy read. And yeah, it was short, but it didn't feel short at all. At the end, I felt like I have read at least 500 pages book.

Night is Elie Wiesel's biography about his experiences in concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. And after finishing this book, I was completely speechless. If reading this book was this hard, I can't imagine how hard it was to live through it. Reading fiction books about WW2 is hard, but still you know that, even though they are based on true events, they are still fiction. But knowing that this book was a non-fiction historical book written by a man who survived all those things, was just... heartbreaking. And nothing I can ever say could express how stupid and useless I think the WW2 was, and how stupid the people are, and how no matter how many bad things happen, we will never learn anything from them. Just like the author said "... the world forgets quickly." History will repeat again, and again, and again, and there's not much to to about that.

Now that I've rumbled for 5-10 minutes, I'm going to finish this review (or whatever it is) here, saying that if you haven't read this book, please do. This is one of those books that every single person alive should read, at least once.

Update
Intrigued by the success and popularity of this book, as opposed to more factual holocaust memoirs, I did a little research on the history of the book, and I came across an interesting article on Wikipedia.
According to the information contained in this article, Wiesel moved to Paris after the war and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina in 1956 as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent")
It is unclear who edited the text for publication. Wiesel wrote in All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995) that he handed Turkov, a publisher of Yiddish texts, his only copy and that it was never returned, but also that he (Wiesel) "cut down the original manuscript from 862 pages to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition."
Wiesel translated Un di Velt Hot Geshvign into French and sent it to François Mauriac. Even with Mauriac's help they had difficulty finding a publisher; Wiesel said they found it too morbid. The text was edited down to 178 pages and published as La Nuit, with a preface by François Mauriac.
Wiesel's New York agent, encountered the same difficulty finding a publisher in the United States. In 1960, Hill & Wang in New York published an even smaller 116-page English translation as Night. It took three years to sell the first print run of 3,000 copies.
By 1997 Night was selling 300,000 copies a year in the United States. By 2011 it had sold six million copies in that country, and was available in 30 languages. Sales increased in January 2006 when it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. Republished with a new translation by Marion Wiesel, Wiesel's wife, and a new preface by Wiesel, it sat at no. 1 in The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction for 18 months from 13 February 2006, until the newspaper decided to remove it.

Literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that Night's impact stems from its minimalist construction. The 1956 Yiddish version, at 865 pages, was a long and angry historical work. In preparation for the French edition, Wiesel's editors pruned without mercy. Franklin argues that the power of the narrative was achieved at the cost of literal truth, and that to insist that the work is purely factual is to ignore its literary sophistication. Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer argues similarly that Wiesel evokes, rather than describes: "Wiesel's account is ballasted with the freight of fiction: scenic organization, characterization through dialogue, periodic climaxes, elimination of superfluous or repetitive episodes, and especially an ability to arouse the empathy of his readers, which is an elusive ideal of the writer bound by fidelity to fact."

In a comparative analysis of the Yiddish and French texts, Naomi Seidman, professor of Jewish culture, concludes that there are two survivors in Wiesel's writing, a Yiddish and French. In re-writing rather than simply translating Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, Wiesel replaced an angry survivor who regards "testimony as a refutation of what the Nazis did to the Jews," with one "haunted by death, whose primary complaint is directed against God ...". Night transformed the Holocaust into a religious event.
Seidman argues that the Yiddish version was for Jewish readers, who wanted to hear about revenge, but the anger was removed for the largely Christian readership of the French translation. In the Yiddish edition, for example, when Buchenwald was liberated: "Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German shiksas [un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe shikses]." In the 1958 French and 1960 English editions: "On the following morning, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls [coucher avec des filles].
But of revenge, not a sign."

Here’s a similar article in the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/bo...


Original review
'Night' was a good read, but I expected a lot more.
The reason I gave 'Night' only 3 stars, is because compared to the other holocaust memoirs I've read so far, I thought this was the weakest.
I gave 5 to 'If this is a man' (Survival in Auschwitz) by Primo Levi and to 'Five Chimneys' by Olga Lengyel, These memoirs were far superior to Mr. Wiesel's.
To 'Fatelessness' by Imre Kertész, I gave 4 stars.

Those memoirs gave more detailed, day-to-day descriptions of how it was to live in the camps. Don't get me wrong, it's not voyeurism I'm searching for in those memoirs. But sitting on my sofa, or in the sun, and never experienced a war or genocide except on television or in the newspaper, I simply can't imagine what life was like in the concentration camps. And I simply want to know the truth.

I think Mr. Wiesel's testimony fails to give the reader a full understanding of that experience. While reading Primo Levi, I nearly lived with him in the camp, felt his cold, his starvation, his exhaustion, the diseases, the mud, the pests...
I did not experience this when I was reading 'Night'. But I have to admit that the last part of the book touched me very deeply. That was the part about the death marches, and about Elie's poor father.
I also wondered why he didn't write anything about the rest of his family? What happened to them?

Mr. Wiesel was only 15 at the time, but already very devout. His experience caused a strong struggle with his faith, and he writes about that battle with God quite often. Of course, that religious conflict doesn't resonate with everyone.
Worse, I couldn't believe this when I read it :
"Yom Kippur. The day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises."

Night (The Night Trilogy, #1) by Elie Wiesel

Synopsis /

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.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.


My Thoughts /

In 2008, writer and journalist, Rachel Donadio wrote an article in the New York Times which mentions that Night spent in impressive 80 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List, after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club in 2006. Originally published in 1955, Night has taken the long road to the best-seller list.

Night is one of the few books (and the only one that I have read) that recounts the experiences of a teenager during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel's memoir offers a detailed and disturbing account of life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. From the starvation rations prisoners were fed, the freezing barracks in which they slept, to the days spent as slave laborers, and the constant brutality of the guards and even fellow prisoners; Elie's story, although unimaginable, is true.

Life in Sighet

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Sighet was the capital of Máramaros County in the Kingdom of Hungary. Following WWI, when northern Transylvania was returned to Romania, Sighet became part of Romania. During WWII, the town was again part of Hungary between 1940 and 1944.

Elie Wiesel was born and raised in an Orthodox family in Sighet.

There were four of us children. Hilda, the eldest; then Bea; I was the third and the only son; Tzipora was the youngest.

Deeply religious, Wiesel spent his time studying the Talmud (a manuscript containing the history of the Jewish religion, as well as their laws and beliefs, which is thought to be the basic tool for learning the ethics behind the customs of their religion).

For Wiesel and the rest of the Jewish community is Sighet, war seems far away, but in the Spring of 1944, the Germans arrive, and the entire population of the town falls to the Nazis. The Jewish citizens of Sighet are first moved into a ghetto, and then onto a cattle car and transported to the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenwald.

I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.

The last day had been the most lethal. We had been a hundred or so in this wagon. Twelve of us left it. Among them, my father and myself. We had arrived in Buchenwald.

The dehumanization of prisoners, the brutal conditions of the camps, forced labour, starvation, the physical abuse of those imprisoned within its walls. Wiesel recounts the unimaginable horrors of life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the loss of his deeply held religious faith. "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.” His descriptions are stark and unflinching. He does not shy away from addressing the atrocities that he witnessed in these camps - his language is direct and leaves little room for interpretation. It's no wonder Wiesel battled with his faith - with the feeling that God had abandoned him and his people.

From a historical perspective, the Holocaust is now almost 80 years in the past. There are generations now growing up who have only ever read about this subject within the pages of a book, like Night. Which, IMO, makes these books even more important.

For speaking out against injustice, violence, and repression, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Un di Velt Hot Geshvign = Night (The Night Trilogy #1), Elie Wiesel, Marion Wiesel (Translator), François Mauriac (Foreword)

"We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald.

Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. Testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.

تاریخ خوانش روز هشتم ماه مارس سال2018میلادی

عنوان: شب؛ نویسنده: الی ویزل؛ مترجم فریده گوینده؛ تهران، نشر لگا، سال1399؛ در133ص؛ شابک9786008987932؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان رومانیا تبار ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

عنوان: شب؛ نویسنده: الی ویزل؛ مترجم احسان قراخانی؛ تهران، میلکان، سال1400؛ در114ص؛ شابک9786222542948؛

الیزر (الی) ویزل، نویسنده، فعال سیاسی، و برنده ی جایزه صلح «نوبل»، و استاد «یهودی»، و از بازماندگان «هولوکاست» بوده است؛ که از سال1998میلادی تا پایان زندگی‌ خویش، سفیر صلح سازمان ملل، در موضوع حقوق بشر بودند؛ «شب» نامدارترین کتاب «الی ویزل» است؛ نویسنده در این کتاب، یادمانهای سرراست خود، از دوران هولناک اردوگاه‌های «نازی» را، بیان می‌کنند؛ این کتاب را نخستین بار خانم «نینا استوار» به فارسی برگردانده‌ است؛ که به کوشش بنیاد جامعه دانشوران، در «ایالات متحده آمریکا» به چاپ رسیده‌ است؛ نویسنده‌ ی کتاب «شب»، «الی ویزل»، هنگامی که همراه مادر، و خواهر و پدرش، از سوی مأموران «اس.اس» پلیس هیتلری دستگیر، و روانه‌ ی کشتارگاه‌های «یهودیان» شد، پانزده سال بیشتر نداشتند؛ بیشتر آن دیگران در اردوگاه‌های «نازی‌» به قتل رسیدند؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 09/02/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 19/12/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

I chose this book as one of several Remembrance Day reads. I read Viktor Frankl’s Man's Search for Meaning just before it and, although there are many similarities, there are also interesting differences.

Reading about life in a concentration camp is a brutal experience. Frankl had the advantages of being a grown man and a psychiatrist when he entered the system—he understood human behaviour, both good and bad, and could make assessments that the teenage Wiesel wasn’t able to. The fact is that anyone who survived the death camps ended up doing things that were selfish in order to survive and people who are starving don’t have the emotional energy to spare to care about others. They are numb to both their own suffering and that of even their own family members. Knowing that other prisoners were in worse shape and could have used more help and/or sympathy left these survivors with terrible guilt, feeling that they were faulty human beings who should have done better. They saw horrible things, they did things that they judge themselves for, and it is absolutely no wonder that they had psychological issues for the rest of their lives.

Where Frankl emerged from Auschwitz with a renewed sense of purpose, Wiesel seems to have changed profoundly—from an innocent, religious, and scholarly young man, he became a crusader to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. This book is a testament to his experience, his survival, and his mission.

“How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?”

A heartbreaking first-person account of the Nazi concentration camps and of the world that let them happen. One of the many things that struck me in this book was the author’s description of how hard it was for Jews in Germany to believe, or to respond behaviorally to, even the most horrendous warnings. Sometimes the nonresponse came down to feeling that one just couldn’t start all over again: “I am too old, my son … Too old to start a new life.” Other times, the warning itself was doubted, because of its extremity.

“Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns … Jews, listen to me! That’s all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!”

It was also striking how quickly the author's family went from being in their home in society at large to being forcibly separated (him and his father from his mother and sisters) and sent to concentration camps, wherein previously unimaginable horrors became part of their everyday lives. When it started happening, when it became clear that the warnings were accurate, it was too late, everything moved so quickly.

“They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.”

IMPORTANT QUOTE:

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

In Night, Elie Wiesel describes the tragedy of the Holocaust, specifically for him and his father, in a first person narrative. In 1944, at the age of fifteen, Eliezer, his family and all the Jewish people found in the small town of Sighet, Transylvania were removed from their homes and shipped to a concentration camp. What follows is Elie’s witness to events that can be described, but hardly imagined. While reading Night, I felt the impossible pain of his experience, yet I can barely visualize the suffering endured. His words are personal. They are true and so open. In it, he does not hide even his own thoughts at the time that reveal the guilt of a wavering faith in man, God and himself.

I read Night because I feel it’s important to remember what occurred 70 years ago. I think that it is best said in Wiesel’s Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech:

“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.”< /i>

I remember that I first became aware of this story when it was put on the Oprah book club list years ago..I’ve always meant to read it since then.
We read all these novels based on the Holocaust and they are really tough to read, but these first hand personal experiences are so brutal and unimaginable.
Ellie was only 15 when he and his family where taken away to the camps.
I really can’t say more then others have said in their reviews, but.. just read it.. or listen, this audio was good!


Excerpt from Night
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 that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
—Elie Wiesel, from Night