Night

I think what stood out the most to me while reading this was the raw honesty of Wiesel's experience. We don't just see the external brutality of concentration camps; we also get to see how it impacts who the victims became as people, how their inner dialogue changed. This is not a romanticized perspective on the Holocaust. This is from the view of someone who lived it.

“We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.”

Night is a short book written about the author’s time in the concentration camps as a young teenager. The first chapters show his family in its entirety – mother, father, sisters, himself, and a small reveal about the townsfolk, particularly his mentor who returns home with a vicious warning of their impending fate. It’s surprising to me how he is ignored and how the town refuses to think that it could possibly ‘happen to them.’ I suppose this is common human show more illogical when faced with devastating news – much like a medical diagnosis even if we’ve been leading unhealthy lifestyles. The tragic, inevitable strikes where Elie and his family go to Auschwitz, and he is then separated forever from his mother and sisters.

Being short, naturally the pacing is quick, but this is not meant to be an action-packed novel in any form. It’s instead a clinical retelling of unimaginable horrors and tragedies. The dry tone is a little offsetting, but I think this is the only way the author could tell it and open up about the painful memory. Sometimes becoming clinical is the only way to survive.

What happened to these poor people in Auschwitz and camps near Berlin is horrifying, but I think the most frightening fact this story conveys is how little emotion was left to the individuals placed in the haunting situation. With its bleak detachment, the story shows how they were turned into little more than animals, soulless and without emotion, even when their friends die in front of their eyes, where they begin killing their own fathers and sons for mere food. And wow, were these people starved.

The worst scene, I think, was the end travel. The snow was frightening enough, but the starvation is something hard to imagine. The haunting scene of the son killing his father for the small piece of bread, then being killed himself as he tries to bite into it, is more than unsettling. It all starts with a game where the guards throw bread into the confinement area just to see what would happen and who would kill who for a such a small portion of nourishment.

At a mere 115 pages, the imagery and inner turmoil is potent. There’s nothing enjoyable in reading non-fiction such as this, but it’s important never to forget. Some people comment on the writing style as being dry and with little emotion, as if that were a negative thing (and in fiction it would be), but here it’s done the only way it can be for this particular author and is in no way written poorly.

“For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.” show less

This book somehow eluded me during my obsessive, gotta-read-everything-about-the-Holocaust phase in middle school. I'm glad I've finally had a chance to read it. It is simple yet truly poetic, profound, and unswervingly honest--it challenges the reader in ways most books do not. Wiesel faced extremes of the human body and spirit and had the bravery to share it with the world. We all should read this book.

I've read before of Holocaust atrocities, some fiction and some non-fiction. I've read too of other atrocities over time, people against other people, people against their own people, down through history. Part of what such reading imparts is that it's never done,* the nature of hatred and trauma means we're easily numbed, we easily grow accustomed, if it happens long enough, if the threat is acute enough. (Survivors remind us, it happens even before they survived: victims numbed to the corpse propped up against them in the cattle car; KZ inmates inured to their bunkmates murdered overnight.)

All of that results from the human capacity for surviving, but that's short term survival. Long term survival (the prerequisite for civilization, show more for life beyond mere existence) requires we unlearn our coping mechanisms --once it's safe to do so. No matter how unpleasant, inconvenient, uncomfortable it is. Such a resolution by a trauma survivor marks the start of a healing journey. There must be something analogous for a community, and logically then, for individuals in a community.

R's school assignment suggested to me it was time to look again.

... if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. We could not prevent their deaths the first time, but if we forget them, they will be killed a second time.
-- Elie Wiesel (1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech)

Wiesel's memoir provides a primer on the sort of policies and behavior used to implement the Nazi "Final Solution", in towns before and after ghettoization, in transport to and between KZ, and in the KZ itself. Wiesel suggests an important consideration is how surviving all this affects a person's understanding of self; and that person's behavior toward others; and psychoemotional & physical reactions to enduring privation, threat, abuse; and that person's faith in people and in a higher being. The pressure from the experience never stops, and the resulting accommodation to such pressure constantly changes over the years and through different events, whether before or after survival.

//

This edition appended other speeches by Wiesel (including the Nobel Peace Prize speech), and speeches by others on the importance of Night and its continued relevance to readers.



* Perhaps atrocity is never past; certainly the necessity for reading about atrocity is never past. show less

Elie Wiesel's recent death moved me to read this, finally. It's been on my shelf for a long long time. I can add very little to what's already been said about this remarkable memoir. That anyone could live through the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, survive and continue to live with the losses and memories of that time, and then write so beautifully about it is just staggering. At the age of 15, Eliezer Wiesel and his family were "evacuated" from their home village of Sighet in Transylvania into a long unimaginable nightmare. Having escaped the attention of the Nazis until the spring of 1944, the villagers were convinced that the war would be over soon, that the Russians were coming and would defeat Hitler's forces in a few weeks, show more that they would not be subjected to the fate of the foreign Jews who had been expelled the year before. In fact, when Moishe the Beadle miraculously escaped and returned to warn them, most refused to listen or believe the stories of what had happened to those deportees at the hands of the Gestapo. No, such things were not possible in the middle of the twentieth century! But the reality of ghettos, cattle cars, forced marches, near starvation, "selection" and crematoria awaited them.

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never." show less

This book was the first Holocaust memoir that I read in full, but for all that it’s a slim volume it has always stayed with me as a powerful experience, remembrance, and testimony. Coming back to it years later, this time without the lens of academia insisting on a thought-provoking analysis to get a good grade, I’m still left wanting to write. What I want to write, I’m not sure, though, as the book opens up so many emotions that I’m left with a feeling of emptiness and regret. Not regret for having read the book, of course, but regret that humanity sat idle and did nothing while those around them suffered; regret that those in power turned away refugees who would have elsewise been saved; regret that even with its shining show more moments humanity has at its core a darkness that must be acknowledged. Even with the hindsight of 75 years it often seems that we have yet to learn from the mistakes of the past, as we continue to allow those who warp power for their own gain to lead and to allow cruelty to overrule compassion. And yet, we have persevered throughout, so while the book may not leave readers with a happy feeling in their gut (or much more than a cliffhanger, not knowing what truly happens to the narrator until the subsequent books) we know that there are still next steps to be taken by those who are able and can make them. show less

Every page of this book is a punch in the face. What happened to him was the worst and he didn't try to hide it or sweeten it. He allowed us to see what happens inside the mind of someone in such extreme situation, the noble and the shameful. I keep with me his frustration, his pain, his doubts, his disappointment.