At 109 pages, the narrative is slim, but it is powerful.Wiesel vividly depicts the dehumanization of concentration camp inmates. The narrative spans the years 1941-45 and recounts the atrocities committed against the European Jews by Hitler's regime. The author bio at the end of the book informs us that the Hungarian-born Wiesel was deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald and eventually received the Nobel Peace Prize."Night" is a first-person account of surviving the Nazi Holocaust. The copyright page notes that the book was originally published in French in 1958. "Night," by Elie Wiesel, has been translated from French by Stella Rodway. For only in remembering will we insist, "Never again!" Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Friends: A Methodology of Soul Care And Spiritual Direction, and Soul Physicians. The inner depths and black darkness of "Night" call us not to squeamish forgetting but to stark remembering. Fortunately Wiesel's candor leads to hope-the confidence that behind the evils in this life there resides a good God working out plans in a mysterious, yet glorious, way. Instead, it grapples candidly with the confusion that life can and does bring. Wiesel discovered that, "God is there in the suffering." His explanation is anything but trite. Don't read "Night" only if you have a queasy stomach or the need to think that this life is a bed of roses. Read "Night" if you are going through your own "dark night of the soul" and want to find an answer to the perennial question, "Where is God?" Read "Night" if you think deeply about life and how it often falls on us and crushes us. Read it to find meaning in a seeming meaningless life. Strongly recommended.Įlie Wiesel's narrative of his own one-year experience spent in a concentration camp has appropriately become a classic in the field. Like Art Spiegelman's "Maus" series, William Styron's "Sophie's Choice", Thomas Keneally's "Schindler's List" and of course, the most heartbreaking, Anne Frank's diary, Wiesel's work lends yet another piercing look into the unanticipated breaches of the human soul during one of history's most dire times. Compressed from a much larger memoir Wiesel wrote in Yiddish, the book represents a powerfully affecting treatment that edits the key moments of his existence to their essence. With his two older sisters, Wiesel was able to survive the camps and share his devastating story with future generations. As we consider the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Dili and Liquica Church massacres in East Timor, the 1994 Rwandan genocide (dramatized in the superb film, 2004's "Hotel Rwanda"), or most pertinently, the detention camps that exist today in North Korea, it is obvious that the Third Reich did not have a monopoly on justifying such slaughter. The propagation of evil from forces unexpected is what makes Wiesel's book resonate today. It's a stark peek into the nature of evil that is at once uncomfortable to acknowledge and invaluable to read and absorb.
He not only records the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi guards toward the Jews, as other have, but more tellingly, describes the inhumanity of the camp inmates toward each other for the sake of survival.
Inevitably, they are taken to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, two of the most infamous concentration camps, where Wiesel provides painfully palpable detail of the day-to-day living conditions. In a concise, unadorned manner, he relives the spiraling insanity that surrounded the Jewish population of Sighet, Transylvania, as insulated a world as one could imagine and certainly a community who understandably could not embrace the insanity of the extermination occurring around them. In a world that often feels like it is teetering toward relenting madness, Elie Wiesel's vividly haunting 1960 memoir still reminds us that there was a precedent for the deranged mindset that justifies acts of terrorism.
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