Terrifying.

I have read two books that described a nightmare, painted a picture of hell. The second was Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy and first is Night.

I still think of this book sometimes and shudder and I realize that evil is never too far buried in us. The scene where the line of doomed prisoners splits in two with Mengela conducting, a perverse parody of the last judgment seems ripped from Dante.

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.

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.

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…”

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?

n  n

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.

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?

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 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, 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.

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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]

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.

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>