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 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.

This is not a book for critiquing. It is a true story that must be read and read again.

COSA È PIÙ ETERNO DELL’INFERNO?



L'uomo è più forte e più grande di dio.
L'uomo è più buono e misericordioso di dio.
Deluso da Adamo ed Eva, dio li scacciò dal paradiso.
Deluso dalla generazione di Noè, s'inventò il diluvio universale.
Deluso da Sodoma, fece piovere dal cielo il fuoco e lo zolfo.
Per non farsi raggiungere dagli uomini che costruivano la torre che doveva raggiungere il cielo e portarli più vicino a lui, confuse le loro lingue e s'inventò Babele.



E invece, gli uomini che hanno riempito i campi di concentramento, traditi e abbandonati da dio, che li ha lasciati torturare, morire di fame, bruciare, gassare, sgozzare tra loro, che fanno?
Pregano dio e lodano il suo nome (p. 69).
Un dio che si manifesta per mettere alla prova, vediamo se siete in grado di dominare i cattivi istinti e di uccidere il satana che è in voi, castigando spietatamente gli uomini (p. 49-50).

Dio che si fa battere da Hitler, l'unico che ha veramente mantenuto le sue promesse, tutte le sue promesse col popolo ebraico (p. 81)

The night that fell over Europe between 1939 and 1945 still darkens all our lives. The Holocaust still haunts us all as an example of the cruelty of which human beings are capable. And it may be that no other book has captured the reality of the Holocaust with the stark power of Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Originally published in 1960, Night is an exceedingly spare book – barely more than 100 pages. In a way, however, the stripped-down, sparse quality of the book makes it an exceedingly effective way to convey the absolute horror of the Holocaust. There is no need for purple prose, or for long, flowery passages of description. The hideous facts speak for themselves; and Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust as a young man, sets down those facts in a clear and no-nonsense manner. The book achieves an almost unendurable degree of dramatic compression.

The first-person narrator of the book is named Eliezer – an indicator of author Elie Wiesel’s determination to emphasize the factuality of what happened during the Holocaust. Forced with his family into a ghetto, and then later onto a cattle car, Wiesel provides brief anecdotes that draw a devastating picture, as when he tells this story from the cattle car:

On the train, one Mrs. Schächter, driven mad by the separation from her family, keeps crying out to her fellow passengers, “Fire! I see a fire!...I see flames, huge flames!” (p. 25). Against the backdrop of her screaming, “Look at the fire! Look at the flames! Flames everywhere….The fire, over there!” (p. 26), narrator Eliezer laconically notes that “we were pulling into a station. Someone near a window read to us: ‘Auschwitz.’ Nobody had ever heard that name” (p. 27).

Once Eliezer and his father, separated from the rest of the family, are inside Auschwitz, much of the rest of the book describes Eliezer’s attempts to preserve his life, and that of his ever-more-ill father, under impossible circumstances. A characteristic example of the thin line between survival and extermination in the death camp occurs when Eliezer works to hold on to the last thing he has that is of any value whatsoever – a gold crown on one of his teeth. Using delaying tactics, pleading illness, he succeeds for a time in putting off the dentist who has been seeking to pull the tooth – and then, suddenly, the dentist is gone.

A few days after my visit, the dentist’s office was shut down. He had been thrown into prison and was about to be hanged. It appeared that he had been dealing in the prisoners’ gold teeth for his own benefit. I felt no pity for him. In fact, I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe. It could be useful to me one day, to buy something, some bread or even time to live. At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup – those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time... (p. 52).

One of the major themes of Night, the loss of faith, is exemplified during a harrowing scene when prisoners are facing “selection” by the notorious Nazi doctor Mengele – a stark moment when prisoners learn whether they will live or die. Looking back from his perspective as an older man who survived the Holocaust, Eliezer recalls how many of the prisoners “lost…faith during those days of selection. I knew a rabbi, from a small town in Poland. He was old and bent, his lips constantly trembling. He was always praying, in the block, at work, in the ranks. He recited entire pages from the Talmud, arguing with himself, asking and answering himself endless questions. One day, he said to me: ‘It’s over. God is no longer with us’” (p. 76).

As the war drags on, and the Soviet Army draws closer to Auschwitz, the Nazis evacuate the prisoners to Buchenwald. Another of the book’s most scarring and painful scenes occurs when workers throw pieces of bread onto the wagons holding the prisoners, to watch the starving prisoners fight over the food. Eliezer recounts what he saw then, as an old man grabbed a piece of bread but was then attacked by his own son:

“Meir, my little Meir! Don’t you recognize me…You’re killing your father…I have bread…for you too…for you too…” He collapsed. But his fist was still clutching a small crust. He wanted to raise it to his mouth. But the other threw himself on him. The old man mumbled something, groaned, and died. Nobody cared. His son searched him, took the crust of bread, and began to devour it. He didn’t get far. Two men had been watching him. They jumped him. Others joined in. When they withdrew, there were two dead bodies next to me, the father and the son. I was sixteen. (pp. 101-02)

Eventually, the first American tank appears at the gates of Buchenwald, and the liberated survivors are left to make what meaning they can of the utter horror that they have endured. For Wiesel, his way of trying to find meaning seems to have been through writing and human-rights activism. The edition of Night that I have before me contains both Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech from 1986, and his foreword to a new translation of Night published in 2006, just ten years before Wiesel’s death in 2016.

The Nobel speech contains some of the sorts of statements that one might expect to see in any speech of its kind – Wiesel states that “One person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King Jr. – one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death” (p. 120), and later states that “Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately” (p. 120). These are the sorts of things that many Nobel Peace Prize laureates say, and heaven knows they need to be said.

At other points, however, Wiesel speaks more directly to his own experience as a Holocaust survivor. At the beginning of his speech, he frames what he is about to say in terms of his Holocaust experience, stating, “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 to be sacrificed” (p. 118).

And he concludes by returning to that framing idea: “This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I express to you my deepest gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them” (p. 120)

By the time this new translation was published in 2006, Wiesel was 77 years old. Accordingly, he had had decades, most of a lifetime, to reflect upon his experience of entering a Holocaust death camp at the age of 16, and living to tell the tale. Accordingly, there is something singularly moving in Wiesel’s reflections on the possible meaning of it all: “There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself….It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give meaning to my survival” (vii-viii).

He builds further upon these ideas in his 2006 preface, writing that “Sometimes I am asked if I know ‘the response to Auschwitz’; I answer only that not only do I not know it, but that I don’t even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response. What I do know is that there is “response” in responsibility. When we speak of this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant, ‘responsibility’ is the key word….” (p. xv).

Response. Responsibility. Elie Wiesel’s Night is a singularly powerful response to the unique horror of the Holocaust, composed in a spirit of profound responsibility. Wiesel, who really should have the last word here, closes with words that we should all remember and take to heart: “The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future” (p. xv).

Deeply moving, man’s inhumanity to man never fails to shock.

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

n  

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.

n
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."
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, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

n
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

A poignant and unforgettable 5 star read.

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” ― Elie Wiesel, Night

It's been years since I've read this book, but as my son needed to read it for school, I decided to read it with him. I'm glad I did.

Night, which is one man's tragic yet remarkable survival of the Holocaust, is a powerful, shocking, heartbreaking, poignant, yet triumph-of-the-soul biography. This book speaks to humanity about the atrocities man is capable of committing. It also demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit and the capacity for good to rise above evil and make a difference.

If you haven't read Night yet, I highly encourage you to read it. This is one of those life-changing books everyone should read.

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.
n  
"... 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

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

n  5 starsn

This is not a review. I am not worthy to review this book. This is my third time reading Night, having read it as a requirement in both high school and college. I picked it up at the library because it was upright on a shelf and I noticed it had a new preface by the author. I have read that preface four times so far. The PREFACE is that important, that thought-provoking. I am speechless. I am awestruck by the tremendous person that Elie Wiesel is. The story is a heartbreaking, terrifying account of unimaginable suffering that must be read and remembered. 5 stars every time.