Night (1955)

You can find my full review at Quieted Waters.

I finally read Night by Elie Wiesel, after years of having it recommended to me. For those who aren’t familiar with the book or the author, Wiesel was a young teenage boy at the time of World War II. He, and the rest of his family, were moved to the concentration camps and forced to undergo all the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and more. When he got out, Wiesel initially imposed a ten-year silence on himself, refusing to write or speak about the experience. This book is his memoir of the experience, ten years later.

Wiesel’s writing is powerful, largely because he lets the incidents speak for themselves. In a spartan writing style, Wiesel allows the horrors of the concentration camps to do the bulk of the emotional work. In barely 100 pages, Wiesel brought tears to my eyes more than a dozen times. ( )

In a word…well, there really is no word to describe Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical account of his harrowing journey though the holocaust as a teenage Jew caught in the Nazi extermination machine. While Wiesel clearly documents the horrors brought on him, his family and his race by the SS, he saves some of his most emotional criticism for himself. We come to realize how the concentration camps turned its captives into selfish automatons whose only motivation was to survive one more day…one more hour. In doing so, Wiesel is able to show how Hitler’s “Final Solution” was far worse than simply killing millions of people. It was attempting to dehumanize them before exterminating them. It wasn’t just murder – it was entertainment for the murderers.

My only criticism of Night is that as horrible as the things were that it described, I wished to ultimately know even more than Wiesel was able to cram into less than 100 pages. But this seems petty for a work that garnered Wiesel a well-deserved Nobel Peace prize. Must reading for anyone who…well, anyone. ( )

Read this book as a summer read during my freshman year of High School along with "Summer of my German Soldier"(2006) and must say that even though it was a REQUIRED read for my school, it certainly did not seem like something that I had to force myself to read.

Elie Wiesel crafts an extrordinary novel that makes you FEEL with each character, especially the main character. I would HIGHLY reccomend this novel to anyone looking for a good read. ( )

Review of NIght by Elie Wiesel

As autobiographies go there are few that can hold a candle to the powerful account given by Elie Wiesel in Night. Wiesel recounts memories from the last weeks in his hometown of Sighet to his families transfer to the concentration camp at Auschwitz and then to the death camp at Buchenwald. Wiesel was only 16 years old when the nightmare of World War II began and he experienced the racial cleansing ordered by Hitler.

Instead of a more thorough summary of the contents of the Night, which I am sure you can find in one of the 306 reviews on this website alone, I would like to focus on the elements of this book that make it such an essential title to teach in High School. First, the book takes the Second World War out of the textbook and away from the soldiers and puts it in the hands of a pious, and somewhat naive, 16 year old that is about to be forcefully thrown into the horrors of the holocaust. He is a relatable character. When I observed a class reading Night this past year, I was surprised by how many of the students talked about Wiesel in the present tense as though he was still the 16 year old in the book and thus related things that happened in their life to how Wiesel must have felt. Making a connection to the story is critical when reading a book and is especially needful when the text of the book is so emotionally painful to read. Being disconnected from the story would make the students unable to experience the situations and therefore be unable to understand the warning inherent in the story and why Wiesel felt compelled to write Night. Wiesel suffers through separation, starvation, and all the horrors of the concentration camps until, by the end, he doesn't even recognize himself as a human. Students are able to follow this progress. I watched one student start shaking when she was explaining what Wiesel went through and she kept on repeating, "Can you imagine? It was horrible."

Night is also a very good book for teaching motif (i.e. night equalling loss) and theme because of the clarity of the writing. The vocabulary that Wiesel used to write his memoir is beautifully succinct, clear and not weighed down with the excess poundage of abstract sentence structure or ideas. Once the students were introduced to motif and theme, I watched them quickly pick out annotations to support assertions they made about both topics. Another surprising moment was when the students had to talk about the ideas concerning family as it evolves throughout the book. Most of the boys in the class latched on to the relationship between Wiesel and his father and how supportive the relationship became. While the girls focused on the initial separation and then Wiesel's guilt by the end that he felt when his father died. Because of the range of ideas about family that you can find in the book, the students were able to pick out different elements of it and then have in-depth discussions comparing and contrasting what they had found.

I did not see any flaws in this work or any criticisms with the version that the teacher chose for this class. I have seen some version that have added footnotes and distracting critical analysis. I liked the fact that in this version the preface is by the author and that the translator is Marion Wiesel, the author's wife. I enjoyed reading the book with HIgh School students. I have to admit that some of the students were so taken in by NIght that I think they forgot it was non-fiction. When you are used to reading non-fiction like that found in textbooks it must feel odd to make such a profound emotional connection with a non-fiction work. So if you are looking for a non-fiction work (required by most school systems) that will make the students realize the value of non-fiction than this is one of the greats. ( )

This is one of those great books about human suffering that stays with you forever and always. I can still see some of the images that Wiesel created in this novel, and find that they haunt some of my nightmares. I don’t know if I fully appreciated the text at the time for what it was, but I see that he was a master of using powerful imagery to make a lasting impression of an event so horrific that it is hard to fathom how something like that could ever happen.