Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18511 in Books
• Published on: 1981-08-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, "Night" is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Customer Reviews

Elie Wiesel is atrue voice of truth and conscience
Night by Elie Wiesel is not only one of the definitve works on Holocaust literature, it is one of the most definitve works on humanity.
This is a factual record of Wiesel's experiences from 1941, when the author was 12 years old, dedicated to learning Talmud and thirsting to learn Kaballah, to his experiences after Jews were forced into ghettoes and then transported to the death camps.
Written in Yiddish in 1958 and translated into English in 1960.
It is a record of Wiesel's childhood in the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. It is dedicated to the memory of Wiesel's parents and his little sister Tzipora who were cruelly murdered in the Nazi inferno.
The book is stark in it's record of everything seen by the author and asks many questions for which answers are difficult to find.
It tells of the vow of Wiesel and a friend in the camp to emigrate to the Land of Israel if they survived, a dream shared by millions who died in and lived through the Shoah.
Perhaps the most horrifying and moving account in the book is when the author reveals how during the first night in Auschwitz, he and his father wait in line to be thrown into a firepit. He watches a lorry draw up beside the pit and deliver its load of children into the fire. While his father recites the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
" Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never".
Elie Wiesel has been a voice of conscience in the world ever since this book became known.
He has penned various other bestsellers. His Elie Wiesel Foundation For Human Rights has done valuable work in this field for many years.
In a plea for the plight of his own people today, especially the youth and children of Israel today targeted by terror and forces of genocide (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ahmadinejad regime- as well as all who are sympathetic to these anti-Jewish elements) he penned an open letter to President Bush stating: "Please remember that the maps on Arafat's uniform and in Palestinian children's textbooks show a Palestine encompassing not only all of the West Bank but all of Israel, while Palestinian leaders loudly proclaim that 'Palestine extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, from Rosh Hanikra (in the North) to Rafah (in Gaza). Please remember Danielle Shefi, a little girl in Israel. Danielle was five. When the murderers came, she hid under her bed. Palestinian gunmen found and killed her anyway. Think of all the other victims of terror in the Holy Land. With rare exceptions, the targets were young people, children and families. Please remember that Israel--having lost too many sons and daughters, mothers and fathers--desperately wants peace. It has learned to trust its enemies' threats more than the empty promises of 'neutral' governments".

Elie Wiesel is atrue voice of truth and conscience.

We must never forget.
`Night' is a poignant, evocative story of a young Elie Wiesel and his father and their experiences in a number of concentration camps during WWII. The translation from French is done beautifully, as it is written in a plain, straightforward manner, and it reads with an eloquence and softness that belies the subject matter. As you read `Night', you find yourself cringing, eyes wide with horror, and it gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach to know that innocent human beings were subjected to physical and emotional pain beyond belief. It is not graphic in the sense that there is too much information, it tells, in its simplicity, the truth of what one person experienced at one time, on this earth. Sixty years later, we believe what history has shown us of these atrocities, yet do we understand? In `Night', Elie Wiesel attempts to make us understand. He talks about Death with a capital "D" and "The Selection" of people for slaughter. His sadness and despair during his incarceration, as well as his alarming indifference to certain things in the name of survival, permeate each page. Finally, we realize that this book is written as a tribute to his father and his father's beliefs that "Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" and keep the memory alive, "Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices". So Elie Wiesel will not stay silent, and we must never forget.

Elie Wiesel's vividly haunting memoir still reminds us. . .
In a world that often feels like it is teetering toward relenting madness, Elie Wiesel's vividly haunting memoir still reminds us that there was a precedent for the deranged mindset that justifies acts of terrorism. 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. 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. 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.

It's a stark peek into the nature of evil that is at once uncomfortable to acknowledge and invaluable to read and absorb. The propagation of evil from forces unexpected is what makes Wiesel's book resonate today. As we consider the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Dili and Liquica Church massacres in East Timor, the Rwandan genocide (dramatized in the superb film, "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. With his two older sisters, Wiesel was able to survive the camps and share his devastating story with future generations. 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. The result is elliptical and startling.