Night Paperback – January 16, 2006

Elie Wiesel’s Night: Shedding Light upon the DarknessElie 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

It is hard for me to read about the atrocities that happened to Jewish people during World War 2. I also think it's important to know history, so the worst isnot repeated. This book made me feel like I was there. Very well done.

NIGHT was among the first widely read accounts of a Holocaust concentration camp survivor. It was originally over eight hundred pages in Yiddish. Weisel worked with the material, re-writing and editing it, first into a two hundred forty five page version published in Argenitina, then into a one hundred seventy page version published in France. NIGHT reached its final form with its one hundred sixteen page publication in 1960 in English in the United States. Wiesel declares that every word of the work is true and he describes NIGHT as his "testimony." Critics tend to feel that the basis for the work is factual, but that Wiesel's long and meticulous re-write and editing has transformed what would have been simple fact into a work of art open to a variety of understandings. Whatever the case, the English-language publication was among the first widely read personal accounts of the Holocaust, and it continues to draw both readers and praise to the present day.The book is written in an unexpectedly matter of fact tone and lacks any trace of self-pity. As such it has an quality that is very difficult to define, one in which most human emotion seems to have been burned away by the experiences the writer endured. Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, a fairly large town first claimed by Romania and later by Hungary. Wiesel writes that he was a studious boy, deeply religious, and the son of respected people. They had heard rumors of how Jews were treated by Germans, but the war seemed very far away, and the stories were incredible to them--even when they were told by a man well known to the Jewish community. The process was fairly slow, with Jews forced to wear the Star of David, prohibited from this and that, and finally forced to live in two "ghettos" in the city. Then, in May 1944, the Jews of Sighet were deported to Auschwitz. Wiesel was sixteen at the time. He would spend about year in various camps before arriving at Buchenwald, where he was liberated by Allied Forces in 1945. When he saw himself in a mirror for the first time since his incarceration, he was horrified by the reflection, which seemed to be that of a living corpse.The book has an abrupt and episodic nature, but most of it focuses on Wiesel's relationship with his father Schlomo Wiesel, and how the two men successfully stayed together during their time in the camps, and how the two men less successfully attempted to care for each other. Although NIGHT is filled with horrors, the ultimate one occurs when the grinding hell of the camp system causes Wiesel to reject feeling for his father as a hinderance to his own survival. Wiesel is also prompted to question God, and whether God exists, and if so how God can accept the Nazi's systematic destruction of the Jews. As one individual cynically comments to Wiesel in NIGHT, he believes in Hitler--because Hitler has kept every promise he ever made to the Jews.There are moments of light scattered in the work--stars in the darkness--a Frenchwoman who risks herself to encourage Wiesel, a friend whose dying act is a gift of music--but for the most part NIGHT is night indeed, and there is no escape. For all its brevity, it is painful to read, difficult to grasp, and incredibly frightening in the ordinary tone in which it is told. The book is published with a preface by Wiesel, a forward by Francois Mauriac, and the text of Wiesel's 1986 speech in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. Strongly recommended.GFT, Amazon Reviewer

This is a short and vivid account of one experience of the Holocaust and while it is striking in it's simplicity and fast-paced terror, it doesn't spend time stopping to rework the experience in terms of it's stark contrast to what was and has been before and since. At one time he breaks to speak of running into one of the people from his experience. I really enjoyed this clash of how survivors are both made uncomfortable and also made more keenly aware of the reality of what happened by speaking of it to those who shared the experience. I wish he had done this more or not at all. It does read like a deposition, not like a novel or memoir since it almost doesn't seem to care about the reader's view, perspective, history or condition. It just is an account, similar to One Day In the Life by Solzhenitsyn. If you compare this to more reflective and thus lengthier pieces it becomes even more stark in it's place and necessity. It isn't here for you to understand, it isn't here for you to critique or review. It isn't even here for you at all. It's here because, as Tim O'Brien said "you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil". It's purpose is to speak a truth, Wiesel's truth, the truth of those who fell in the snow or went right instead of left, the truth of those beaten to death by their brethren for a crumb of bread. It reads as a photo of a caged veal calf, held to your face so you can never pretend that this didn't happen.