Night (Night) Paperback – January 16, 2006

Every human on this planet should read this book!

It's not very long but it didn't need to be. It is heart wrenching and infuriating and inspiring and about a million other adjectives I could think of... but that's the kind of feeling we need to experience when we're reading about this type of horror. The real life, actual horror people inflict on one another, sick, twisted, wretched, heartbreaking and utterly disgustingness of what Nazi Germany really did.

Elie survived, that in itself is a miracle, that he chose to share that terrible chapter of his life with all of us so that we may learn, that's his gift to us. Don't waste that.

It only takes good men to do nothing for evil to prevail. Keep your eyes open, people.

This....I lack words. Mr. Wiesel has woven a tale of such epic proportions, describing in all too vivid detail the horrors of the holocaust. There is a REASON this book ranks up there with The Diary of Anne Frank as one of the definitive works for this subject matter. I was saddened to hear of Mr. Wiesel's passing. When it came time for my son to study the holocaust in school, I decided to add this book to his learning experience. This book captures the gravity of the situation, and explains the horrors, perhaps not adequately, because how could one convey that level of horror to anyone who hasn't lived it, but as well as I think is possible on paper. This is always, ALWAYS my first recommendation when the topic of holocaust literature is broached.

Elie Wiesel is a Nobel Prize winning author and Night was his first step into the arena. But his aim was not to become a world renown author and historian but rather to tell his personal story of the incomprehensible Holocaust. One of the passing characters in the book escapes from the concentration camp and returns to his home town to describe the atrocities he saw, and no one believes him, because how could human beings perpetrate such deeds, and how could others possibly bear them. Elie Wiesel continued his mission throughout his life with the intent of immortalizing those who died, including his entire family (except for one brother if I remember correctly). He campaigned during the rest of his life for many locations of genocide in the world, but first and foremost in the book tells his very personal story of the concentration camp inhumanity, torture and murder. He bravely describes the torment of his father and Elie's own disappointment in himself, a boy merely 16 years old, in his passivity. He makes the characters of his family come alive and you feel the grief and tragedy in their murder. But some main impressions are people's disbelief that what they heard could actually happen to them, and later the belief that tomorrow would be better but it never was. He is brave to be able to describe in detail the hunger, flith, exhaustion and death of so many in a way that lets you see the horror but not so vividly that you have to skip pages, which often happens to me with Holocaust descriptions. I think I skipped one incident. I was glad to see it available as a kindle book because I always felt it was a hole in my cultural experience that I had not read it. It is a classic and I hope it will continue to be read by many. Given that Elie Wiesel died this year I felt it provided a greater understanding of who he was and what he and his people went through. May it never happen again.!

Elie Wiesel’s Night: Shedding Light upon the Darkness

Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night (New York, Hill and Wang, 2006, translated by Marion Wiesel), is one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed work about the Holocaust. The New York Times called the 2006 edition “a slim volume of terrifying power,” yet its power wasn’t immediately appreciated. In fact, the book may have never been written had Wiesel not approached his friend, the novelist Francois Mauriac, for an introduction to the French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, whom he wanted to interview. When Mauriac, a devoted Catholic, mentioned that Mendes-France was suffering like Jesus, Elie Wiesel responded, in the heat of the moment, that ten years earlier he had seen hundreds of Jewish children suffer more than Jesus did on the cross, yet nobody spoke about their suffering. Mauriac appeared moved and suggested that Wiesel himself write about it. The young man took his friend’s advice. He began writing in Yiddish an 862-page manuscript about his experiences of the Holocaust. The Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina published in Yiddish an abbreviated version of this book, under the title And the World Remained Silent. Wiesel later translated the text into French. He called it, more simply and symbolically, Night (La Nuit), and sent it to Mauriac, who helped Wiesel find a publisher (the literary and small publishing house Les Editions de Minuit) and wrote its Preface. The English version, published in 1960 by Arthur Wang of Hill and Wang, received strong critical acclaim despite initially modest sales. Elie Wiesel’s eloquent and informed interviews helped bring the difficult subject of the Holocaust to the center of public attention. By 2006, Oprah Winfrey selected Night for her high-profile book club, further augmenting its exposure.
This work is definitely autobiographical—an eloquent memoir documenting Wiesel’s family sufferings during the Holocaust—yet, due to its literary qualities, the text has been also read as a novel or fictionalized autobiography. The brevity, poignant dialogue, almost lyrical descriptions of human degradation and suffering, and historical accuracy of this multifaceted work render Night one of the most powerful Holocaust narratives ever written.
Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel was only 15 years old when the Nazis entered Sighet in March of 1944, a small Romanian town in Northern Transylvania which had been annexed to Hungary in 1940. At the directives of Adolf Eichmann, who took it upon himself to “cleanse” Hungary of its Jews, the situation deteriorated very quickly for the Jewish population of Sighet and other provincial towns. Within a few months, between May and July 1944, approximately 440,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly those living outside of Budapest, were deported to Auschwitz aboard 147 trains.
Wiesel’s entire family—his father Chlomo, his mother Sarah, and his sisters Tzipora, Hilda and Beatrice—suffered this fate. Among them, only Elie and two of his sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, managed to survive the Holocaust. However, since the women and the men were separated at Auschwitz upon arrival, Elie lost track of what happened to his sisters until they reunited after the war. In the concentration camps, father and son clung to each other. Night recounts their horrific experiences, which included starvation, forced labor, and a death march to Buchenwald. Being older and weaker, Chlomo becomes the target of punishment and humiliation: he’s beaten by SS officers and by other prisoners who want to steal his food. Weakened by starvation and fatigue, he dies after a savage beating in January 1945, sadly, only a few weeks before the Americans liberated the concentration camp. Throughout their tribulations, the son oscillates between a paternal sense of responsibility towards his increasingly debilitated father and regarding his father as a burden that might cost him his own life. Elie doesn’t dare intervene when the SS officer beats Chlomo, fearing that he himself will become the next victim if he tries to help his father. In the darkness and despair of Night, the instinct of self-preservation from moment to moment counteracts a lifetime of familial love. Even when Elie discovers the death of his father in the morning, he experiences through a sense of absence: not only his father’s absence, as his bunk is now occupied by another inmate, but also the lack of his own human response: “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...” (112)
Night is offers a stark psychological account the process of human and moral degradation in inhumane conditions. Even the relatively few and fortunate survivors of the Nazi atrocities, such as Elie, became doubly victimized: the victims of everything they suffered at the hands of their oppressors and the victims of everything they witnessed others suffer and were unable or, perhaps more sadly, unwilling to help. Although Night focuses on the loss of humanity in the Nazi concentration camps, the author’s life would become a quest for regaining it again, in far better conditions, if at least one condition is met: caring about the suffering of others. As Wiesel explains to his audience on December 10, 1986 during his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Oslo, his message to his son--and his message to the world at large—is about the empathy required to keep the Holocaust memory alive. He reminds us all, “that I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. … We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (118).

Claudia Moscovici, Holocaust Memory

I have not read the previous translations, so I can't comment on the changes. I have read books on the topic in the past and this was the simplest book of them all. It's written very simply and it's short...perfect for someone who doesn't read much or for a pre-teen. For me it was a bit too simply written. By that I don't mean to say the experience of the author was not valid..I suppose after reading Remarque's Spark of Light at the age of 12 I just expected more....
But yes..this book is not about literally excellence. It's about his experience.