Night, by Elie Wiesel

I breezed through this book in a matter of hours during my first couple of days of unemployment. Since high school I had known of this book not only as a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature but also as a striking account of the stark and harsh reality suffered by Jews in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel was only about 15 years old in 1944 when he and his family were shipped off in a suffocating train car along with the rest of the Jews in his town after having been forced to live in starving ghettos for weeks. Later in life, Wiesel became the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University and founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

With horrifying detail he recounts his own experience of his time spent in Auschwitz concentration camp, where his mother and sister were killed, and later at Buchenwald where his father died.

Night is a story of death. Though Wiesel survived, it seems a part of him died in his teen years. This book illustrates vividly the death of not only his family, but of his innocence and also the death of this once devout Jewish boy's faith.

Reading, my heart broke repeatedly. There's there part where he found himself angry at his father because his father let himself be beaten. There's the part where he admittedly loses all faith in God. There's the scene when a friend says, "I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." There's the part where during a running march from one camp to another he watches a friend wither and stop running only to be trampled to death under the feet of his Jewish brothers.

After the train ride to Buchenwald, which took near a week, he writes, ''The guards came to unload us. The dead were abandoned in the train...The last day had been the most murderous. A hundred of us had got into the wagon. A dozen of us got out." The scene when his father dies is perhaps the most wrenching, because Elie Wiesel was unable to cry, "It pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears."

This book is a must read, I believe, for anyone. A real eyewitness, a non-sugar coated account of the horror of the Holocaust. (And I can't believe there are still people in the world today who think the Holocaust was a hoax!) The mood and tone of the book are perhaps best captured in this segment which captures Wiesel's lament of his first night at Auschwitz:

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.

If you haven't yet read it, give Night the time of day. You will be changed and enriched to experience Wiesel's story. May we never forget this Night, and may we always strive to bring light to those experiencing their own dark night of the soul.