Night Book Review

Content warning: this review discusses the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was one of the most tragic events to have ever taken place on this very Earth. Eleven million people, including six million of Jewish faith, perished under Nazi orders. And yet, there were those who lived to tell the tale. One of them was Elie Wiesel, who was in the concentration camps for about one year of his life. He wrote his 1956 memoir Night about this period. It’s a profound book which proves one doesn’t need to sensationalize the Holocaust because it was already shocking and horrifying.

Translated from French by his wife Marion Wiesel, Night describes Elie’s time in the concentration camps during World War II. Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania (now Romania), Elie was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and later to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of his memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and the despair as a deeply observant Jewish person confronting the evils of man. This story proves that this horror should never be allowed to happen again.    

I can’t imagine how difficult it was for Wiesel to write about his experiences. He recalls exactly how it was and lists the things he did. If I went through something like that, I would tell it in a similar way. A reviewer that I know rated this as three stars because of this listing, but that’s the point. This is the way Wiesel chose to process what happened to him in the concentration camps, and he lived with that trauma for over 70 years until his death in 2016. It always bothers me on how people are so desensitized to violence that they want to see more abuse in horrific situations as a way to up the stakes, even in actual historical events. Yes, Wiesel witnessed many horrible acts like watching guards beat up fellow prisoners, but the most horrendous aspect was the fact that they were in the concentration camps with the very real fear of being “selected.” As he said to Oprah Winfrey years later, they were living inside death. Isn’t that enough to show how terrifying the Holocaust was?

Wiesel thankfully doesn’t focus too much on the abuse. Instead, he emphasizes his survival and thoughts. He took advice from those who had been in the concentration camps for a while. Some of this meant lying about his age, but it was all to avoid getting “selected.” He also tried to stay by his father’s side and vowed never to leave him. Additionally, he studied Kabbalah prior to the Nazis rounding his family up. However, during his time in the concentration camps, he started questioning his faith and why God would allow these atrocities to happen. As a result, he began to lose trust in religion through this horrific episode.

One of the most impactful aspects of the memoir is how haunting it can be. There are several moments that shook me to my core. One was in the beginning when Elie’s tutor Moishe the Beadle disappears. He soon comes back to warn the town about what the Nazis are doing, and barely anybody believes him. The other was at the very end when Elie and the other prisoners were liberated by American soldiers. It could’ve stopped there, but it does when he finally sees himself in a mirror for the first time in about a year. Even though he survived, I wasn’t sure how he was going to live afterwards.

Night by Elie Wiesel is a powerful memoir about the author’s experiences in the Holocaust. While his writing is dry, short, and straight to the point, it was no less haunting. His story proves that one doesn’t need to sensationalize this horrifying episode in world history because it’s already terrifying, especially to those who survived it. I don’t say this often, but Wiesel was incredibly brave for sharing his experiences. I would recommend it to everybody who hasn’t read it yet. Memoirs like these demonstrate that not only did the Holocaust very much exist, but it also left a deep scar to those who made it out alive.

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