Night and Fog [Hardcover]

Arne Brun Lie (Author), Robby Robinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1990

Imprisoned in a series of Nazi camps where filth, silence, and torture were ever present, Arne Brun Lie watched his friends weaken and die. For decades, he was haunted by his past. Finally, he set sail from Boston to Norway, where he was able to make peace with that past, perhaps even with the German people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As a student in Norway in 1944, Lie, a member of the resistance, was captured and transported to Germany, into Nacht und Nebel , night and fog. He spent the duration of the war in three concentration camps. Writing with freelancer Robinson, he relates that he bore the psychic scars of that experience for 40 years, finally achieving catharsis on a sailing trip with two friends from Boston to his homeland. Lie, now a Massachusetts "fish farmer," tells us that in exorcising his demons, he arrived at a deeper humanity, a belief that people should not divide the world into "us" and "them" but must work to create unity. Although the concentration camp story has been related many times, readers will find Lie's memoir especially moving and inspiring.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In 1944 19-year-old Arne Lie was arrested in his family home in Norway for involvement in a resistance raid. Transported from one camp to another, finally ending up in Dachau, Lie watched the boys he'd grown up with die around him. With luck, guile, determination to survive, and the aid of friends, he made it through, but for over 40 years he was unable to come to terms with the experience. Haunted by nightmares, Lie finally found meaning in his ordeal as he wrote about it on a sailing trip across the Atlantic. His camp memories are absorbing, but intercutting them with the voyage dissipates the effect. Still moving, though, and recommended for public libraries.
- Pat Ensor, Indiana State Univ. Lib., Terre Haute
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 254 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (February 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393027791
• ISBN-13: 978-0393027792
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,104,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A gripping must-read WWII resistance and sailing adventure December 28, 2009

By Diana M. Henry

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Arne Brun Lie's Night and Fog, 1990, constitute the memoirs of a Norwegian teenager who at 16, in 1944, after a few weeks of dabbling in the resistance, was arrested as an NN, avoided execution for reasons he never discovered, and spent the last year of the war in Natzweiler, Dautmergen, and Dachau. During my presentation to the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in LA on 12/22, I read a couple of pages of his recollection and response to his arrival at Natzweiler, pages 140-142. It brings the remembered voice of a disrespectful but already wise adolescent to the three dozen other memoirs of the camp, by other Nacht Und Nebel prisoners committed to the destruction of the Third Reich, for the enduring honor of mankind.

Lie's candid teenage memories resurface during a transatlantic sailing adventure which forms the other half of the story. Both narratives blend surprisingly well into a gripping read, even for sailing novices. Very highly recommended, with Boris Pahor's Pilgrim Among the Shadows, to fill in some of the story of a little known concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthof.