43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Night, October 7, 2008
This review is from: The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day (Paperback)
Night is a painful and harrowing story about the madness and the evil that darkened Europe during the Second World War. Elie's story begins in Transylvania in a small Jewish neighborhood where Elie and his family live, unknowingly, on the brink of terror.
Elie, his family, and community are captured, shuttled into railroad cars, and transported to Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's largest concentration camp. So quickly turns the fate of Elie and his family that they disbelieve their circumstances even as they witness people being conducted en masse to gas chambers and crematoriums. The weak are killed. The strong become industrial slaves, entitling them only to hope for another day and a slower death.
Elie survives Auschwitz and Buchenwald, outliving both his mother and his sister. But Elie still has his father. Sensitive and intuitive, he notices that many fathers die after losing their loved ones. Elie realizes that if he were to die, his father would soon follow. Elie tells himself that he must live in order to give his father hope for living.
Elie does eventually live to see his father die in an infirmary, emaciated, exhausted, beaten, spiritless, and vulnerable like a child.
While his father's health is still in decline, Elie daily brings half his ration of bread to him, but that would not save his father from the darkness. A German soldier beats the last bit of life out of his father while he lay prostrate on the edge of death. "Elie," his father exhaled with barely the strength to whisper his son's name as his last word. Elie, motionless, unable to utter the words in his throat, confronts the guilt of being unable to help his father. How could he allow the soldier to beat his dying father? Why was he too afraid to cry out to answer his father's call? So helpless against the growing darkness.
Elie is most vulnerable when contemplating a world without God where darkness prevails. How can we, he asks, witness thousands burned in crematoriums or children being shot, thrown into a pit, and buried without losing our belief in a loving God? How can God himself ignore such evil? Where can we find a place in such a world for the Torah, the Kabala, and belief?
Yet, in a world hostile to belief and hostile to life, Elie witnesses and shows us himself that hope and faith do still sprout up like grass through cracks in the sidewalk, or, more appropriately, like moonlight through cracks in the curtain. The Night is dark, but not pitch-black where yet lives one sensitive soul.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must Read, July 8, 2008
This review is from: The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day (Paperback)
This is a must read - for everyone! A real, raw and riviting account of Ellie Wiesel's personal experience during the Holocaust. Starting when no one believed the pending danger of war... to the formation of ghettos and finally life in a concentration camp. His Nobel Peace Price Acceptance Speech at the end of the book is an important bonus! We must NEVER FORGET... Ellie's account will help.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Night Trilogy, a review, February 28, 2009
This review is from: The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day (Paperback)
It is, in a nutshell, the most powerful book I have ever read. It challenges you not only emotionally but intellectually as well. It redefines your views of humanity and the world. To call it a masterpiece would still be an understatement. A definite must-buy for everyone who cares about himself and about the world he lives in.
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