Excellent narration by George Guidall, who does the accent very well, and very easy to understand.

The story is a look into the mind of a holocaust survivor turned Israeli freedom fighter who has been assigned to execute a British soldier in retaliation for the hanging of an young Israeli soldier. The Brit was kidnapped, and his execution was a threat to retaliate. The British thought they would not go through with it, but the Israelis felt that once they made the threat, they had no choice but to follow through or lose credibility.

There was no action involved. It was all psychological or philosophical. The author wrote the story to explore his thoughts on how he would react to such a situation, that is, whether a peace-loving man could kill a stranger on purpose for an important cause.

I had mixed feelings about the subject. On the one hand, I have long felt that Israel is too heavy-handed in their dealings with the Palestinians. It seems that many innocent Palestinians suffer because of the retaliations against the terrorist elements. But on the other hand, I understand why it happens. Throughout history, it seems that the peaceful Jews have been persecuted by most of the world. After what happened during Hitler's reign, I can see how they would want to have a safe haven where they would not be persecuted for their religion. Being surrounded by nations who do not want them around, they feel they need to be the meanest dog in the junkyard to survive, and so try to never show weakness.

The book makes me examine my feelings about war. A simple philosophy is that war is always wrong. But isn't it sometimes justified? If it is, then who decides? When is it justified for one country to take land from another? It's not really that uncommon in our history. The whole situation is very sad to me because I feel that the people there are mostly friendly and peaceful, yet they can't seem to get along. Probably, it's much the same as the troubles in Ireland. ( )

Dawn was different from Night. Dawn was fiction and Night was a memoir. Dawn made me think about life's choices and implications from a moral and philosophic perspective. Night was a highly emotional journey. On the surface they are so different it is hard to think of them as related, as one following the other. But as one evolving from the other, Dawn evolves from Night. ( )

This small, slender volume was a pretty weird read. It's the story of two young men, one of whom will kill the other at dawn.

The narrator of the story is the assassin. In his mind, he reviews the story of his life, and what has brought him to this point, where he will kill another human being, face-to-face, in retaliation for the execution of one of his comrades in what he calls, "The Movement."

The story takes place in Palestine before it became the state of Israel (before 1948). After the decimation of World War II, there were many Jews who felt (justifiably) that the world had turned its back on them while they suffered and died, and so they decided to create their own nation-state in the land of Palestine, their historical homeland. However, Palestine is in a hotly contested part of the world, which is occupied at the time of the story by the British. Some Jews, some of them Zionists, are carrying out acts of terrorism against the occupying British army and government. One of them has been arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for carrying out one of these acts. In retaliation, the narrator's group of fighters has kidnapped a British soldier and is holding him hostage, to be killed at the same time as their comrade is executed.

That's the setup of the plot. The story is about what transpires in the narrator's mind and over the course of the evening before he's to kill the British soldier, and that's where it gets weird. He feels the weight of his dead relatives who didn't survive the war or the concentration camps, and their ghosts gather around him and talk to him, impressing upon him the importance of carrying out his duty. At times it's hard to tell whether he's dealing with reality, or he's living in that world of the past, with those beloved dead.

This is not an easy book to read, but it's definitely worthwhile reading the trilogy if you chance upon it. The first book in the trilogy is "Night," followed by "Dawn," and finally, "The Accident." I think I'm going to have to do a little "light" reading in between "Dawn" and "The Accident," because this one was a challenge, and very emotional. ( )

Justice and revenge waltz in geometric confusion. This was encountered in the high tide of my Holocaust reading. The applications to our present reality were unrealized at the time. ( )

Set after WWII, Elisha had been in a concentration camp, but when he got out, he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He was then recruited into a terrorist group in Israel. At 18 years old, Elisha is told he is to murder a kidnapped English soldier. The (very short) book (in the intro, Wiesel calls it a novel, but it’s under 100 pages) is the day or two leading up to the murder, as Elisha is coming to terms with what he has been tasked to do.

Boring. The premise doesn’t sound too bad, but ultimately, it was mostly Elisha discussing philosophy with his fellow terrorists. It is billed as book 2 after “Night”, but it was fiction whereas Night was a memoir. I won’t be reading the 3rd book. ( )