Night, with the Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

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 show more 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. show less

Eliezer was 15 years old when he, his sister and his parents were taken prisoner by the Nazis and deported from their home in Sighet, Transylvania, for the crime of being Jewish. Upon arrival to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, Eliezer and his father were separated from Eliezer’s mother and sister, never to see them again. To survive the most inhumane conditions imaginable and to avoid immediate death, Eliezer and his father desperately tried to keep up their strength, thereby demonstrating to the Nazis their usefulness in their ability to work. Each day brought new horrors, torture, starvation, exposure, exhaustion, and illness. Constantly, death hovered over them and the other prisoners. Their challenge: how to avoid the show more physical and emotional damage that hastened that almost certain death.

The author does a stunning job of presenting the difficult subject of the Holocaust. He follows a father and son as they move from a religiously-observant life in Transylvania to the agonizingly slow and painful experience of deportation and imprisonment in a series of concentration camps. To make this story more acceptable, the author makes it neither long nor frightfully graphic. It presents in clear detail the movements and emotions of one young man caught in an unreal world and how he suffers in his attempt to survive. What causes the greatest sadness and horror to the reader is the slow realization of the degree to which man can inflict physical and emotional pain on another human being with little or no remorse. It is a difficult lesson but one which needs to be taught, understood, and remembered by all people. Elie Wiesel begins this terrible education with Night. show less

'Night' is Elie Wiesel's account of his childhood experiences in a Hungarian ghetto and the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Buchanwald. The book begins in 1941 in Sighet, Transylvania, where 15 year old Eliezer, a devout Jewish teenager, studies the Talmud and dreams of mysticism. His whole world alters drastically when Hungarian authorities, collaborating with the Nazis, deport the Jewish community in the town into packed cattle cars heading for Auschwitz.

"Men to the left! Women to the right!" With these ordinary commonplace words, Eliezer's world is torn asunder. His mother and sisters vanish forever, leaving him with only his father to cling to. They endure forced labour, starvation and beatings but just as Allied forces approach show more offer hopes of salvation, the prisoners are forced on a death march to Buchenwald in the depth of winter.

Wiesel keeps his narrative sparse, plain and simple. There are no flowery tangents or metaphors, the book isn't littered with statistics but nonetheless each sentence is yet another hammer blow on the reader's emotions. His matter-of-fact simplicity makes the horror more acute.

"We received no food. We lived on snow; it took the place of bread."

In many respects this book told me little that I don't already know about the terrible conditions and savagery that the detainees had to endure but what sets this book apart from other Holocaust accounts that I've read is its unflinching examination of the slow erosion of faith in the face of absolute evil. As Eliezer asks: "Where is God now? Where is He?" It's this spiritual crisis that forms the philosophical backbone of the memoir. There is anger obviously, not just at the Nazis and the Kapos who worked for them but also the town's elders who ignored the prior warnings, the world for its silence and in particular at God. Just how could an all powerful and all seeing deity allow this inhumanity to happen?

This book was originally written in Yiddish and that version was apparently significantly longer, so perhaps its the translation that's at fault not the original, but here the final third felt hurried and seemed to lack the emotional impact the first two-thirds. Despite its faults I still believe that this book deserves to be more widely read. Not so that you can admire the author's skill but because it soon becomes increasingly difficult to look away whether or not you believe in God. show less

Oh, this book hurts. It's painful to read, but impossible to set down. Wiesel does an amazing job of recapturing scenes from his time in Auschwitz, to the point where I had recurring nightmares for several weeks after reading this (in 9th grade, when I'd've liked to have thought I was less impressionable). It's not for the weak-stomached, but I'd recommend it to anyone.

This short book is a difficult but important read. The words aren't big, but its truth is weighty. Wiesel bears witness to his time in numerous concentration camps after the Nazis inexorably constricted the lives of Jewish people in their empire. Flashes of goodness in various people don't outweigh the darkness of a talented civilization bent to wrongdoing.

I have read many books that touch on the Holocaust, but this is the grandfather of them all. The author's preface and his Nobel acceptance speech, included in the copy I read, add much to the context. Weisel struggled to get this book published, and it sold poorly at first. No one wanted to hear the painful truth.

I finished this book on a bus filled with angry commuters, cold as heck yet with my glasses fogging up due to breathing in my scarf. It was a very strange mixture of feelings, and yet it was not nearly as discomforting as the book I was reading.

I made a comment in one of my updates that I have read a fair number of books about World War II, a fair number that include concentration camps, and that the descriptions here were not different. I then said that I became broken when periodically I would remember that what I was reading was not fiction, but memories. This book doesn't tug at your heartstrings. It doesn't break your heart and make you feel sad. Instead, it disintegrates any feeling of hope you had for the human race. It rips show more your soul from your body and tosses it into the deep abyss. Perhaps that is too much of a description, but what makes this book so powerful is the reminder of the horrors that were dealt every single day inside the concentration camps. When Elie finally lost his father, I wept, even though I saw it coming from a thousand miles away and knew it was only time. When he made "friends" with another prisoner, I learned not to hope that they would stick together until they could see the throes of liberation, because chances are, the friend would soon be dead on the ground beside him, the only evidence of his life in the form of a broken violin by his side. There are many books about concentration camps, and I will never read them all. They tell tales of horror and disgust, and to think that the human race is responsible for such a tragedy is horrendous and makes me weep for mankind. It feels disgusting to say that this is a good book. It is not a good book. It tells the story of a boy - a BOY - forced to labour, ripped from his home, see his family die, witness his peers be beaten for things they cannot help. I cannot say I enjoyed this book for it feels like I am saying I enjoyed this boy's pain. But, this book, this book is a magnificent description of the most horrendous period of our time, and for that reason alone, to ensure their suffering is never forgotten, is why you should read it. show less

I first read this book about 40 years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. On hearing of the passing of Elie Wiesel I decided it was time to drop what I was reading and read it again. As he says in his preface to the new edition, we all have a "moral obligation to try and prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory."

Eliezer Wiesel sits with Anne Frank at the top of the list of must-read books about the holocaust. While Frank puts a human face on those who died, Wiesel, as one who witnessed and endured the horrors of the holocaust takes the stand and testifies with heartbreaking eloquence of all that he saw and suffered.

Much of Wiesel’s eloquence is in its brevity. In show more little more than 100 pages he dishes up one of the most powerful indictments of Hitler’s Final Solution ever written.

"'Men to the left! Women to the right!'
Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words.
Yet that was the moment I left my mother."

Wow. In 28 words he consigns over half his family to the crematorium. No emotion. No blubber. Yet nothing he could have said could have made the reader feel more keenly the horror of the event.

The part of his story that chills me the most is not the constant death but how easily the inmates’ tormenters were able to dehumanize them. What is worse; to kill a man or to turn him into someone who would kill his own father for a crust of bread? Yet Wiesel manages to remind us that even in the depths of Hell, there is room for a touch of the sublime.
"Those were my thoughts when I heard the sound of a violin. A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living?

It had to be Juliek.

He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence.

I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men."

The 2006 revision of the book includes a new preface by Wiesel and, at the end, the acceptance speech when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In it he said"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere."
Although Elie Wiesel is no longer with us, his words, his testimony, will live on. Jewish tradition teaches us that we are never really dead until there is no one who remembers us. Let us hope that Eliezer Wiesel stays with us for a long, long, time. show less