Night [SPECIAL EDITION] (Mass Market Paperback)

by Elie Wiesel (Author) "They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life..." (more)
Key Phrases: assembly place, Moshe the Beadle, Meir Katz, Rabbi Eliahou (more...)

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 -- Review

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (March 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553272535
• ISBN-13: 978-0553272536
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (929 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,930 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #3 in	Books > Religion & Spirituality > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > Wiesel, Elie
  #11 in	Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Historical > Holocaust
  #18 in	Books > History > Military > World War II > Personal Narratives

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, May 8, 2000

By	"cabaret_54" (Ashburnham, MA United States) - See all my reviews

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.........

59 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Night, May 31, 2000

By	marco (Harbor City, California) - See all my reviews

"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.

89 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "To the very last moment, a germ of hope stayed alive.", January 19, 2005

By	anomie - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

Several years ago, I went though a period when I read everything I could get my hands on about the Jewish Holocaust. Of all the many, many haunting books I read, "Night" by Elie Wiesel, left me shattered. Wiesel's autobiographical account of 'life' in the concentration camps remains one of the ten most influential books I have ever read.

When the book begins, it is 1941, and Elie is a 12 year old Jewish boy growing up in the small village of Sighet, Transylvania. His father is a shopkeeper, and Elie is one of 4 children. As Elie matures, and becomes more cognizant of religious matters, WWII seems a distant event. Rumblings of trouble begin with the news that all foreign Jews are to be deported, but by 1944, there are rumours that the war will end soon--it is just a matter of time before Germany's defeat. Again there is news that the Jews in Budapest are being rounded up in ghettos, but these seem like distant events. The news that German soldiers are now on Hungarian soil is troubling, but Elie's father elects to stay. The situation rapidly declines and Elie's family--along with all other Jewish residents in the village, are shipped off to concentration camps.

Elie, now 15, arrives at Birkenau, and then is sent to Auschwitz. He is parted from his mother and his sisters without even being aware of the moment when he sees them for the last time. Elie and his father survive an initial selection conducted by Dr. Mengele, and then their existence in the camp begins.

This slim book rouses, at once, so many feelings--pity--that any human being should have to suffer so much, but also the idea emerges that if one should survive, what is left? Elie suffers degradation, loss of faith, loss of family, and finally loss of any semblance of humanity. He experiences the great shame of caring for nothing except survival--even when daily survival brings starvation, misery, and freezing cold. Wiesel does not spare himself in this chilling memoir--he has no mercy and no excuses as he recounts his own starvation and struggle for survival--no matter the cost. Above all, the book taught me to never count hope into the equation when making decisions about taking action in life. Hope is cheap, and it isn't real. "Night"--is simply an unforgettable book, and a recent re-reading reminded me of the book's power--displacedhuman