Night

I read Night by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel has written over 50 books. Such as Dawn, The Accident, The Town Beyond the Wall, The Jews Silence, A Jew Today, and many others.  In the introduction he stated that Night is the book he is most proud of. I think reading Night before his other books was a smart idea because you get to see what he has been through and get background information about the author. I have not read any other books by Elie, but I look forward to reading his other pieces. Night tells Wiesel’s story while he is living through the holocaust. Wiesel struggles with his faith and it is a constant conflict in the text. The lesson in this book I believe is family. Through everything Elie stuck with his father until the very end. Towards the beginning of the book his belief in god is absolute. He cannot imagine a life without god. But his faith was shaken by his experience during the Holocaust.

Elie lives in his hometown of Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. Wiesel and his family where taken from their home in 1944 and moved to a concentration camp called Auschwitz. Later he was moved to Buchenwald. In the beginning Elie and his father were separated from his mother and sisters, whom they would never see again. He and his father pass evaluation and are told to walk on, where they stumble upon an open pit filled with burning babies. All of the able bodied men are put to work in a camp, where they are put under slave-labor conditions. Elie was even forced to give an old man his gold tooth, which was pried out of his mouth with a rusty spoon. Wiesel himself starts to lose humanity and his faith, both in god and in the people in the camp with him. The Nazis decide to evacuate the camp because the Russians were charging and were on the verge of liberating Buna (the work camp he was in). The temperatures were very low and the prisoners were began a death march. They are forced to run over fifty miles in the snow. Many die from the harsh conditions. The remaining prisoners were loaded in to a cattle car and shipped off to another camp. One hundred Jews board that cattle car at the end of the journey twelve remained. Elie and his father were included in the twelve survivors. Elie survives but he feels hopeless and depressed.

This book honestly changed the way I look at life. I extremely recommend this book. The text makes you see the Holocaust from the prospective of an innocent boy. The book dug up my feelings and made me cry. The book itself has a great writing style. The text is so descriptive. I could picture the events perfectly. I am studying WWII and Night helped me gain a very distinct picture of what the war looked like.

Book Review by Paige C.