Night [Paperback]

Elie Wiesel (Author), Stella Rodway (Translator), Francois Mauriac (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0553272535 | ISBN-13: 978-0553272536 | Publication Date: March 1, 1982 | Edition: WITH A NEW PREFACE BY ROBERT MCAFEE BROWN

Night -- A terrifying account  of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young  Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of  his family...the death of his innocence...and the  death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as  personal as The Diary Of Anne  Frank, Night awakens the shocking  memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it  the unforgettable message that this horror must  never be allowed to happen again.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.

Review

"To  the best of my knowledge no one has left behind him  so moving a record." -- Alfred Kazin

  "Wiesel has taken his own anguish and imaginatively  metamorphosed it into art." -- Curt Leviant,  Saturday Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 109 pages
• Publisher: Bantam Books; WITH A NEW PREFACE BY ROBERT MCAFEE BROWN edition (March 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553272535
• ISBN-13: 978-0553272536
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (944 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Historical > Holocaust
  • #32 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Jewish
  • #80 in Books > History > Military > World War II

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, May 8, 2000

By 

"cabaret_54" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night (Paperback)

Elie Wiesel's account of Nazi Germany left me stunned. Once I finished, I just sat there thinking about the book and realizing that it wasn't a work of fiction, but a true story. I had to read this book in my high school English class and it blew me away. The way he and his father try and beat the odds to stay together, the horrors of a concentration camp, what its like to go for days without food, etc. The sheer simplicity of it makes it seem so real, yet so fake. The metaphors and personification that he uses to describe events are beautiful. There are so many underlying meanings in the book, so many great lines (That night the soup tasted of corpses) that make you sit back and wonder how this sort of thing could have happened. I recommend this book to anyone (probably 9th grade and up, its pretty gruesome) and have nothing but good things to say about it, definitely one of the best books I have ever read. If you forget everything about this book, NEVER, EVER forget that it was a true story, and the last line.........

62 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Night, May 31, 2000

By 

marco - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night (Paperback)

"Night", by Ellie Wiesel, explains his real life in the Concentration Camps during World War II. His family and friends who were originally from Hungary were Jewish and were forced into starving, suffering, and mistreatment by the German leader, Adolph Hitler. The Nazi death camp's horror turns this young boy into the agonized witness to his family's murder, and the destroys his faith in God. This book awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute worst and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again. The autobiographical nature of this book helps the readers identify with all the suffering and mistreatment that many innocent people had to witness and go through. Ellie Wiesel makes the scenes so real that any reader can feel like they were living in the horrible and terrifying events. The scenes are so vivid that the words can picture the Jews during the mistreatment of the Holocaust. Wiesel has described a painful journey through the darkness, through the false dawns and false days, until there are hints that tiny shafts of light can pierce the seemingly unending nights.

160 of 189 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reality and humanity at their worst., April 12, 2003

By 

Eran Cohen (Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night (Paperback)

"Night" may be one of the hardest books you will ever read.

Nobody can top reality. The dreadfulness, terror and shock that originate in the imagination of horror novelists can never begin to compare to the real events that happened during World War II, in a time that is widely referred to as the Holocaust.
"Night" is about the true and terrifying events that Eli Wiesel has gone through during those days.

Inside, you are going to meet the young Elie Wiesel, born in the town of Sighet, Romania, presumably into a good life. Then you'll meet the phenomenon of denial among the Jewish people; so many had never believed the reports about the horrible activities of the Germans and of the other European nations during the War - until it became their fate as well.

This pitiful and destructive denial continues even while being transferred like cattle to concentration camps, through the first revelations of brutal and barbaric behavior amid the Jews themselves in the face of inhumane conditions. Their eyes are finally opened only in front of the gates of hell - the crematoriums of Auschwitz.

Having survived the selections there, Wiesel continues to live on and witnesses atrocities, loss, immense pain and sadness in different concentration and death camps, and comes to questioning everything he has ever learned in his short life to that point.

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Why would you want to spend your time reading something that horrible?

You probably have general information about the atrocities that took place in those cursed days; having seen films like "The Schindler's List" you have an idea about how it was like. Having seen documentaries with interviews of survivors might add some more knowledge to your overall concept about what it was like.

Reading books about it is the next step.

There is always something new that a person hasn't heard of, probably would never have imagined and that cannot be conveyed via the visual media. Furthermore, reading a book is quite different from seeing a film in the sense that one gets the chance to crawl into the mind of a person that has been through this unprecedented ordeal. What one may discover about human nature - both of the murderers and their victims - may be extremely upsetting and difficult to grasp.

Why is it important to read this book and others like it?

To remember that it happened and to do as much as anyone can do to never let it happen again.

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In the end of the last paragraph I almost added, "to pray to God it would never happen again", but then again I remembered how God was awfully quite as it was all taking place. I don't know where God was during those times, but Wiesel gives his answer that comes from within, while witnessing the hanging of a young boy: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on the gallows..."

Yes, in the aftermath of the Holocaust there was a sweeping faith crisis; the concept of God and the belief in mighty powers became a problem among the Jewish people, and as I've learned during my latest trip, among many Europeans as well. How could He let it happen? Why? Where was He? And ultimately, should the people that suffered to an unparalleled extent forgive Him? Can they? Who should they blame?

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In this shocking account you will not find the answers for these questions.

The conclusion you may draw in the end of the day is that it's up to us to protect ourselves. We can trust ourselves - and ourselves only - in the fight against the forces that wish to destroy us.