Review: Night by Elie Wiesel

Title: Night

Author: Elie Wiesel

Publication Date: 2006

Publisher: Hill and Wang

ISBN: 9780374500016

Synopsis from Goodreads:
Night is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the father–child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

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Night should be a mandatory book in every high school history class about the Holocaust. At once devastating and accessible, Night shares Elie Wiesel’s experience in Nazi Germany and his survival of the concentration camps. This story is profoundly powerful and incredibly terrible. I have many friends who read this book for class while still in high school. My knowledge of the Holocaust came more from books that I read on my own, WWII movies, or television documentaries, and less from the textbook reading that we were assigned in class. Night is an honest and raw portrayal of the slow round up of the Jewish citizens, their relocation to the camps, and the horrors they faced there.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to run into a few people who have only a vague idea of the Holocaust, if they know what it is at all. I find this incredibly sad that we live in a world where people are walking around not knowing that this tragedy took place. The one thing I want to say to these people is read this book. It does not over embellish. It also does not minimize or downplay. It is as honest as it could possibly. Weisel’s objective is to tell his story and to share his knowledge, and he does so with clarify and factuality.