Night

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

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 book was required reading during my high school years, but I wanted to read it again. If it is not required reading now, it should be. Sadly I'm not sure it is still required, as I have witnessed that many younger people do not learn about the Holocaust in school. I am told it is because it will "upset" the kids. Well, many things in history are not pleasant, but it is still history and it does the people who suffered a disservice to ignore events or candy coat them somehow just to make them less unpleasant. I think it also teaches resilience and strength to learn of horrible events in history, which builds a stronger human being in the end. I think Mr. Wiesel would agree with me, and his book Night is a prime place to start with teaching about the human spirit, the good and the bad. Reading this book at a younger age, I was driven to learn more about the Holocaust and was inspired to visit a concentration camp in Austria upon high school graduation. I'll never forget walking through the forest leading up to Mauthausen, feeling as if I could smell the burnt, smoky air from the crematoriums decades prior. One could still see the scratches in the walls of the showers where people were gassed, and countless other horrifying details that were somehow frozen in time, kept original, at this concentration camp-turned memorial. Though I would recommend it, you don't have to visit an actual concentration camp to learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust and some of the darkest days in human history. Night is a human document of what happened and brings the reader into the experience in such a way that you will feel as if you traveled to the site and witnessed the events as they were happening. A great and very important book.

Good book. Interesting, however the print is very small.

Lu en classe avec mon cours d'anglais, ce livre est une merveille qui vous laisse des traces. Relatant le tragique passé de l'Auteur, chaque chapitre est un nouveau coup de poing. Certains passages sont difficiles à lire, non pas à cause de l'écriture. Mais bien de la réalité atroce qui y est décrite. À lire absolument.

one of the greatest books out there really shows the insanity of events that was the holocaust not just what happend at the concentration camp but it showcases also what hapened before and after really showing the effects of dehumanisation on a person

Great person. Valuable story. Awful history. Might not be the best work on the subject, it is one of the most valuable.

I had read Eyewitness at Auschwitz by Filip Mueller. It was raw and had very tough content. Here, the book by Élie Wiesel was written in a very different emotional way. The words hit me almost physically and at one stage, I was crying. Both books are pretty fantastic but in less words than Filip Mueller, you feel the tragedy much more. I worked as à proofreader. Words very rarely reached my gut like that. I could not put either books down and ended up reading them both, one after the other. I will.never forget the book by Élie Wiesl. This is powerful stuff.

Un acogedor relato sobre la estupidez humana y la animalidad que vive en cada uno de nosotros, sin embargo, en cada página se muestra el corazón de la humanidad, lleno de esperanza, de ilusiones que aún lejanas defienden lo más valioso que poseemos: la vida.