Every time I read books like this I’m beyond heartbroken. Just read it.







Mel

Upon completion of this book, my mind is as numb as if I had experienced this suffering myself. So much pain and suffering are thrown at you from the pages that one cannot comprehend it all in the right perspective. One can only move forward as the victims in this book did. Step by step, page by page. Initially, numbness is the only way to deal with such anguish.
Otherwise one becomes quickly overwhelmed by the images that evoke questions that cannot be answered.
And yet, I read this book from the comfort of a warm home and a full stomach. Imagine the impact if it were otherwise. Imagine being forced from your home to live in barracks, living off soup and bread, forced to go outside in the winter without a jacket, and perform manual labor from dawn to dusk with the smell of a crematorium in your backyard.
How many of us could endure this for just one day, let alone, for years? What would this do to us physically and more important, what would this do to us mentally? Yet, we witness in this book the miracle of the prisoner's survival. The strength and raw endurance of the human spirit. We must be reminded of this this glorious strength, but also reminded that it was the weakness of the human spirit that inflicted these crimes on others.
Humanity has the capability of extreme strength, but also of extreme weakness (which often hides under the guise of self-righteousness and need for power over others). This book is necessary in order to remind us of this. These things must not be forgotten. Read this book even if you think you have read enough of the Holocaust and of pain and suffering. Every book that I have read about the Holocaust offers something new including this one. Read it as a memorial and a tribute. Read it as a reminder of how fortunate we are to have a free society and how we must preserve this freedom at all costs. There are those who would like to take it away. Fascism is alive and well.
I started reading Holocaust novels after reading Edelweiss Pirates ‘Operation Einstein'. (Edelweiss Pirates #1) [bookcover:(Edelweiss Pirates #1) ‘Operation Einstein' n  n they are must reads in this genre are of course Number the Stars n  n Number the stars.
I enjoyed that authors other works. That novel was 'The Book' that turned me onto YA WW2 novels. They allow us to reflect on our own lives, learn history and become better people in general.

This book has garnered so many five-star reviews and deals with such important subject matter that it almost feels like an act of heresy to give it a mere four stars. Yet that is exactly what I'm going to do, for while Night is a chilling account of the Holocaust and the dehumanisation and brutalisation of the human spirit under extreme circumstances, the fact remains that I've read better ones. Better written ones, and more insightful ones, too.

Night is Elie Wiesel's somewhat fictionalised account of the year he spent at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It's a chilling story about his experiences in and between concentration camps, his gradual loss of faith (he was a very observant Jew who obviously wondered where God was while his people were being exterminated), and his feelings of guilt when he realised that his struggle for survival was making him insensitive towards his dying father. It's gruesome, chilling material, and I felt very quiet after having read it. Yet I also felt vaguely unsatisfied with the book. I wanted more detail. I wanted fleshed-out writing rather than a succession of meaningful one-line paragraphs. I wanted less heavy-handed symbolism (the book very much centres on troubled father-and-son relationships, to echo the one central Father-and-Son one) and more actual feeling. I wanted a writer (and a translator) who knew better than to call an SS officer 'an SS'. And most of all, I wanted a less abrupt ending. I wanted to ask Wiesel what happened in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald. I wanted to ask him what happened to his leg, on which he marched for several gruesome days just days after having undergone an operation, and how he picked up the pieces afterwards, and why on earth his two eldest sisters, who died in Auschwitz as well as his mother and younger sister, never warranted more than a single mention. The latter was an example of seriously shoddy writing, I thought.

Perhaps my questions were answered in the original version of Night, which never got published. In his introduction to the new English translation of Night, Wiesel mentions that the book as it is today is a severely abridged version of a much longer Yiddish original called And the World Remained Silent. I think I can see why the original wasn't published (quite apart from the fact that the world wasn't ready yet for concentration camp literature, the few quotes provided in the introduction make for heavy reading). The abridged version definitely seems more readable than the full-length one, and does an admirable job getting the facts across. Even so, I think the publishers might have gone a step too far in abridging the book to the extent that they did. No doubt the very brevity of Night is one of the reasons why it's so popular today, but personally, I would have liked to see a middle road between the original (detailed) manuscript and the incredibly spare barebones version sold now. Don't get me wrong, the abridged version is effective, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the Holocaust for people with short attention spans. I prefer Primo Levi and Ella Lingens-Reiner's more complete accounts of life in the camps myself, not to mention several Dutch books which sadly never got translated into other languages.

But still. Night is an important book, and one that deserves to be widely read. In fact, one that should be widely read, by people of all ages and nationalities, to prevent nightmare like this ever happening again.

July 2, 2016: On hearing of the passing of Elie Wiesel, President Obama, who visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp with Wiesel in 2009, said "He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all its forms. He implored each of us, as nations and as human beings, to do the same, to see ourselves in each other and to make real that pledge of 'never again.' "
I first read this book about 40 years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. When I heard the sad news I decided it was time to drop what I was reading and refresh my memory of Wiesel's seminal holocaust memoir. As he says in his preface to the new edition, we all have a "moral obligation to try and prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory." As some people drink to forget, I read to remember.

Eliezer Wiesel's memoir sits with Anne Frank's diary at the top of the list of must-read books about the holocaust. While Frank puts a human face on those who died, Wiesel, as one who witnessed and endured the horrors of the holocaust takes the stand and testifies with heartbreaking eloquence of all that he saw and suffered.

Much of Wiesel’s eloquence is in its brevity. In little more than 100 pages he dishes up one of the most powerful indictments of Hitler’s Final Solution ever written.

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”
Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words.
Yet that was the moment I left my mother.

Wow. In 28 words he consigns over half his family to the crematorium. No emotion. No blubber. Yet nothing he could have said could have made the reader feel more keenly the horror of the event.

The part of his story that chills me the most is not the constant death but how easily the inmates’ tormenters were able to dehumanize them. What is worse; to kill a man or to turn him into someone who would kill his own father for a crust of bread? Yet Wiesel manages to remind us that even in the depths of Hell, there is room for a touch of the sublime.

Those were my thoughts when I heard the sound of a violin. A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living?

It had to be Juliek.

He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence.

I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.

The 2006 revision of the book includes a new preface by Wiesel and, at the end, the acceptance speech when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In it he said

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.

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Although Elie Wiesel is no longer with us, his words, his testimony, will live on. Jewish tradition teaches us that we are never really dead until there is no one who remembers us. Let us hope that Eliezer Wiesel stays with us for a long, long, time.

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.
.

What can be said about this book? It should be required reading. It should be taught in English classes, in history classes, in every school. If, like me, you are out of school and never had to read it, pick up a copy right now.

It was so blunt, so raw, and so horrifying, that I didn't even cry. Because from the first moment it was too much. I felt numb, the way that Wiesel himself became numb, because it was simply too awful, and yet too unreal at the same time. I've read books about the Holocaust, nonfiction and fiction, but nothing that was like this. I truly feel that Wiesel's life was spared so that he could bear this powerful witness of the horror of the Holocaust.

This edition also includes his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which did move me to tears, and which should not be missed either. It is a short and fitting epilogue to the book.

I read this book once before
but read it again yesterday---with the new preface by his wife Marion Wiesel.

I did not plan on reading the whole thing--I just wanted to read the new Preface---but then while sitting around (with sick people in the house)--I just dived into the horror again.....(with expanded thoughts than in years pass).

Why has this book been changed on my bookshelf to the audio edition? Why do so many of my books editions get changed? This really pisses me off.

5★
This is “the” Holocaust book, and it is presumptuous of me to even comment, but here goes.

“‘No, I wanted to come back, and to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to me…’ [Moshe the Beadle] That was toward the end of 1942.
. . .
Spring 1944. Good news from the Russian front. No doubt could remain now of Germany's defeat.
. . .
‘The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it. . . ’ (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)
. . .
Then came the ghetto.
. . .
we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic. . . .
. . .
Everyone marveled at it.”

Slowly, slowly, the Jewish population of Sighet, a small town in Transylvania (Romania) was squeezed out of their homes and into a ghetto. But the Russians were due any day now, and surely things can’t really be as bad as Moshe the Beadle kept saying. People don’t do that to each other.

Moshe the Beadle had been a “man of all work” at the temple, an insignificant, unimposing, inconsequential little man who was treated with what I’d call fond disregard. Young Eliezer Wiesel was a very devout boy of twelve who loved the old stories and read them almost as if they were current news. He would run home to tell his mother what had ‘just happened’, almost as if a child warned their parents about the Big Bad Wolf who had tricked Little Red Riding Hood.

His father said he was too young to study seriously, but Moshe was happy to discuss everything with him. Sadly, Moshe was one of the so-called ‘foreign’ Jews who were the first to be deported from the villages. Nobody really understood, but they pretty much forgot about him . . . until he returned. He had miraculously escaped! He wanted to warn them.

“Moshe had changed. There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or of the cabbala, but only of what he had seen. People refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to them. ‘He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has!’ they said. Or even: ‘Poor fellow. He's gone mad.’ And as for Moshe, he wept.”

Wiesel describes his childhood, family, and town with loving care. We know what kind of people they were, what kind of life they lived and how they cared for each other and their village.

As the Jewish members of the community were gradually pulled together into the ghetto, and then the ghetto was shrunk, Elie’s father declined the opportunity to fill out papers to apply for emigration permits to Palestine. He was too old to change, he said. This will end soon.

But change he would. The remaining Jews were finally told to collect a few things and some food and were put in the infamous cattle cars to be sent to the camps. Weisel describes every thought and every step of the way with great care. A particularly moving passage, for those of us who are reading today, knowing the truth, was when a woman looked out of the carriage into the night.

“It was Madame Schachter. Standing in the middle of the wagon, in the pale light from the windows, she looked like a withered tree in a cornfield. She pointed her arm toward the window, screaming: ‘Look! Look at it! Fire! A terrible fire! Mercy! Oh, that fire!’
. . .
There was nothing there; only the darkness.
. . .
‘She's mad, poor soul. ’”

It happened again, and finally again at Auschwitz when they looked and saw the flame of the crematorium. She wasn’t mad. For whatever reason she could foresee the dangers that Moshe the Beadle had tried to warn them about. Weisel spent a year in the camps when he was 15, lost his family, and somehow survived. He spares no details, and I have trouble understanding how anyone survived the abuse, the cold, the starvation. I think I'd have curled up and let the snow take me.

Weisel said he waited ten years after the end of the war before writing this because silence is as important as words. I sympathise, but his words are so important to counteract the silence of so many others.

After breaking his silence, he wrote his first draft, which he says was 900 pages in Yiddish. This edition which I read in English, was translated from French and is much shorter. He worked as a journalist in France for several years before making his home in the United States where he was a Professor in the Humanities at Boston University for many years. Whatever the language, the experience is universally horrifying, but his memory is crucial and must be shared.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said,

“. . . this honor belongs to all the survivors and their children, and through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

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 meant to be sacrificed.

I remember: he asked his father: ‘Can this be true?’ This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?

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.”

Elie Wiesel did everything possible to make sure nobody forgets. He travelled the world, working with world leaders in trouble spots, including Rwanda, to remind us all that this “othering” and ethnic cleansing must be stopped.

The subject matter and the experiences are as heartbreaking as you’d imagine, but we must remember. Australians say “Lest we forget” as we remember all the soldiers who have died for the country. And yet the world still turns a blind eye to Rwanda, Cambodia, the Rohingya, refugees . . . the list goes on.

If you read only one book about the Holocaust, read this one, and carry on the campaign for human rights and calling out abuse for what it is.

Backlist A Thon: Shortest backlist title

I'm gonna make this quick because this book was extremely disturbing.

Night is the story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. Elie's entire family was murdered by the human garbage known as The Nazi's. Elie Wiesel and the millions of other Holocaust survivors saw the absolute worst of humanity and somehow survived.

Night is brutal and gruesome read but its also a very important one.

A Must Read.

I’ve read enough on the Holocaust that I never felt great pull to read this testimony. But it called to me this winter, and I was glad I answered. It is a slim volume that bears witness to Wiesel’s family being confined by the Nazis to a ghetto in their town in Transylvania and later his separation from his mother and sisters and confinement with his father at the camp in Auschwitz. There the teenager struggles unsuccessfully to save his father. All the wisdom and hopefulness instilled by his Rabbi turns to ashes in the dog-eat-dog world of life on the cruel edge of survival.

The vignettes of his existence in the camp are spare and unflinching, but they do not tell you what to feel. That is part of the power of this writing, which he didn’t take up for more than ten years afterward. The elements of humanity in his fellow prisoners seem to become rarer in the face of hunger, cold, and pervasive death. Toward the end, Wiesel can’t help but see the dark truth in advice from another prisoner:
Here every man has to fight for himself and not to think of anyone else. Even of his father. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.

After the liberation of the Buchenwald camp where he ended up, Wiesel doesn’t think of revenge but how to face himself:
From the depths of the mirror a corpse gazed back at me.
The look in the eyes, as they stared into mine has never left me.

This is one of the most commonly read books among my Goodreads friends. But it appears that two-thirds of you, like me, have put off reading it. Out of my feeling that this wasn’t just the outcome for the Jews at the hands of an alien, twisted segment of our species, but something that all humans need to take ownership for, I urge more of you to read this.

Reread for class January 2015

I just cannot provide a star rating for this book. It's one of the hardest and scariest books I've ever had to read. There are really no words to describe this so I'm not even going to try.