Night (1958)

Night is an account of 15-year old Eli Wiesel's imprisonment in Auschwitz in 1944, followed by a death march and eventual liberation. Wiesel's mother and sisters are exterminated by the Nazis, while he is left to scrap for survival with his ailing father. It is a personal account describing his evolving religious belief and desperation to stay with a father who needs his protection. The focus is not on how the concentration camps are run, but on emotive scenes of the young and old being eliminated, bullying within the camp hierarchy, and the prisoners' raw fight for survival.

If this were the first and only Holocaust memoir I had read, I would have rated it highly. But I read Night just after Primo Levi's memoirs, and it pales in comparison. Published around ten years after Levi's If This Is a Man, I expected more. But what truly irks me is dishonesty. Night came about after many iterations: first the original 860-page Yiddish, then a 260-page abridgement, third a 180-page French translation, and finally 115-page English translation of the French. Critics say what's lost in translation is a change in emphasis from a Yiddish account for Jewish readers attacking Germans to a French translation aimed at Christians more critical of God than the Nazi regime. To me the message and impact of such a work should be universal. We're talking about humanity here, not propaganda: there should be no need to edit for readership, and it's disappointing this has likely happened here.

Levi describes events and characters as they are, while Wiesel dwells on his personal journey in an evocative fashion designed primarily, if not exclusively, to shock. The pace of Wiesel's narrative is fast, detail somewhat lacking, the dialogue likely fictional. Wiesel himself has admitted Night incorporates fictional elements. In my opinion, invest some more time to tackle If This Is a Man, or another recommended Holocaust memoir, and return to Night for a more emotional journey, or to complete an Oprah Book Club challenge. ( )

Elie Weisel's award winning story of his time in concentration camps . It seems and is close to fact but is a novel. Beautiful, terse, poignant and provocative as he goes from Poland loving a quiet life to being at Auschwitz and other camps where tens of thousands are abusers killed and burned in crematoriums. He is the only member of his family to live as his father who is with him for a long time in the camps finally dies.

Phenomenal firsthand account of a Holocaust concentration camp survivor. Sad reminder of a brutal piece of human history. All should read this book. ( )

Interesting story. I am so used to reading statistics about the Holocaust. This book is all about the lived experience. Parts of it are very surprising, the way daily life actually worked. The presentation is very selective and a lot is skipped over; it is sketchier and more impressionistic than I'd like. The writing is clear and not powerful, but the story is powerful. ( )

[Publisher] Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.