Customer Reviews

The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"Night" is without a doubt, the best of the three works in the trilogy. Wiesel's experiences are heart-breaking, yet he retells his story with a degree of frankness that illustrates the complete emotional breakdown that victims of the concentration camps experienced. "Night" is an horrifying account of the Holocaust, and it ought to be read for years to come as a reminder to what can happen when mankind loses its humanity. Although Wiesel prefaces "Dawn" and "Day" as being works of fiction, the two stories are much less fictional narratives then they are brief insights into the mind of a man who has been emotionally broken by the horrors he experienced. To read "Dawn" and "Day" without associating them with Wiesel as their author would be a mistake, as Wiesel's questioning of God's existence and the goodness of humanity is inherent in both works.

This book has been an interesting journey. For anyone that needs to see the human side of this tragedy this is it...Elie Wiesel and his wife have used words to paint a remarkable picture of his experience and have allowed the reader to ask deep questions and struggle within himself for some of the answers..

Definitely worth the journey...

This was powerful and thought provoking. It wasn't an easy or comfortable read, but I still think of the concepts presented quite often.

I had read the first book ("Night") for my AP Literature and Composition course in high school. I decided to go back and reread after college. This trilogy definitely opens your eyes to the horror and inhumanity the Jews faced during the Holocaust. The individual that reads this book needs to be mature as there is some disturbing, yet true and factual, content in the book. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone.

I have read these books many times over the past 30 or 40 years and regularly buy them again as gifts. I did this Christmas and hope they will continue to make as powerful impression on others as they have on me. The big numbers in the Holocaust can be numbing and dull us to what happened. Here is a compelling first person narration that leaves you trembling even after all these years. Read it.

All my 17-year-old granddaughter asked for me to give her this Christmas was this book. It arrived in what seemed like minutes. I didn't realize when I wrapped it, however that the author had autographed it with a blue sharpie on the inside cover. She discovered it fast enough, and could not believe I had secured for her an autographed copy. She will treasure it forever. You made me the hero this year. This book is a must-read for anyone studying the Holocaust.

This touching first hand account written by Elie Wiesel, was disturbing. The irony of the survivor, is the transformation that happened to their values within the context of the Concentration camp. This was a suggested book for our book club and it stimulated great discussion. The book came on time and was in almost new condition. I always order our book club picks on Amazon.