No one should need an excuse to re-read a book as powerful as Night, but if I needed one, the new(er) translation by the author’s wife provided it. Everything that needs to be said about this book has been said, I suppose, many times over. In its brief, straightforward narrative it captures not just the horror of the attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews, but the destruction that was wrought even in the souls of survivors. Amid all the other losses, including members of his family, the loss that persists through the book, is the narrator-author’s loss of faith, the loss of God. The one thing that might have helped make sense of the grotesque insanity was gone, and with it, a large portion of the previously pious young victim’s self and soul. Remarkably (particularly given how pious the narrator was before being herded in cattle cars with so many others to Auschwitz), the complete loss of a sense of God’s justice did not happen over the course of a long incarceration as he struggled to find meaning in the light of faith. The change was immediate, everything was lost in a day, so brutal, so thorough, was the Nazi violation. How could a just God let this happen? There are so many memorable scenes in this short book: the journey in the cramped cattle cars; the arrival at the camp; the sight, sound, and ash of the crematorium; the hanging of a child; the crusts of bread; the forced march when the camp was abandoned at war’s end; the gratuitous murders even in a place where gratuitous murder was the organizing principle. And there are so many painful moments, most having to do with loss: the loss of God, the loss of identity, the loss of friends and family, in the end the loss of his father, too, who was his mainstay through most of the ordeal. But there are also moments of remembering that humanity must be preserved. As the camp was being evacuated, the prisoners stopped long enough to clean their prison camp. Why? To let the liberating army know “that here lived men and not pigs.” I was reminded of Italian chemist Primo Levi’s account of his imprisonment in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, in which he describes the ex-army sergeant who washed daily, even though the water was dirty and he had only his soiled clothes to dry himself with. But he did it, and encouraged others to do the same, for the sake of dignity more than cleanliness, to remain human and to prevent the machine of war, imprisonment, and dehumanization from turning prisoners into beasts, as its masters wished it to do. This book is a ringing call to remember, and to resist injustice, ignorance, and apathy. As Wiesel said in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 (reprinted at the end of this book): “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

Elie Wiesel’s Night: Shedding Light upon the Darkness Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night (New York, Hill and Wang, 2006, translated by Marion Wiesel), is one of the best-known and most highly acclaimed work about the Holocaust. The New York Times called the 2006 edition “a slim volume of terrifying power,” yet its power wasn’t immediately appreciated. In fact, the book may have never been written had Wiesel not approached his friend, the novelist Francois Mauriac, for an introduction to the French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, whom he wanted to interview. When Mauriac, a devoted Catholic, mentioned that Mendes-France was suffering like Jesus, Elie Wiesel responded, in the heat of the moment, that ten years earlier he had seen hundreds of Jewish children suffer more than Jesus did on the cross, yet nobody spoke about their suffering. Mauriac appeared moved and suggested that Wiesel himself write about it. The young man took his friend’s advice. He began writing in Yiddish an 862-page manuscript about his experiences of the Holocaust. The Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina published in Yiddish an abbreviated version of this book, under the title And the World Remained Silent. Wiesel later translated the text into French. He called it, more simply and symbolically, Night (La Nuit), and sent it to Mauriac, who helped Wiesel find a publisher (the literary and small publishing house Les Editions de Minuit) and wrote its Preface. The English version, published in 1960 by Arthur Wang of Hill and Wang, received strong critical acclaim despite initially modest sales. Elie Wiesel’s eloquent and informed interviews helped bring the difficult subject of the Holocaust to the center of public attention. By 2006, Oprah Winfrey selected Night for her high-profile book club, further augmenting its exposure. This work is definitely autobiographical—an eloquent memoir documenting Wiesel’s family sufferings during the Holocaust—yet, due to its literary qualities, the text has been also read as a novel or fictionalized autobiography. The brevity, poignant dialogue, almost lyrical descriptions of human degradation and suffering, and historical accuracy of this multifaceted work render Night one of the most powerful Holocaust narratives ever written. Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel was only 15 years old when the Nazis entered Sighet in March of 1944, a small Romanian town in Northern Transylvania which had been annexed to Hungary in 1940. At the directives of Adolf Eichmann, who took it upon himself to “cleanse” Hungary of its Jews, the situation deteriorated very quickly for the Jewish population of Sighet and other provincial towns. Within a few months, between May and July 1944, approximately 440,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly those living outside of Budapest, were deported to Auschwitz aboard 147 trains. Wiesel’s entire family—his father Chlomo, his mother Sarah, and his sisters Tzipora, Hilda and Beatrice—suffered this fate. Among them, only Elie and two of his sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, managed to survive the Holocaust. However, since the women and the men were separated at Auschwitz upon arrival, Elie lost track of what happened to his sisters until they reunited after the war. In the concentration camps, father and son clung to each other. Night recounts their horrific experiences, which included starvation, forced labor, and a death march to Buchenwald. Being older and weaker, Chlomo becomes the target of punishment and humiliation: he’s beaten by SS officers and by other prisoners who want to steal his food. Weakened by starvation and fatigue, he dies after a savage beating in January 1945, sadly, only a few weeks before the Americans liberated the concentration camp. Throughout their tribulations, the son oscillates between a paternal sense of responsibility towards his increasingly debilitated father and regarding his father as a burden that might cost him his own life. Elie doesn’t dare intervene when the SS officer beats Chlomo, fearing that he himself will become the next victim if he tries to help his father. In the darkness and despair of Night, the instinct of self-preservation from moment to moment counteracts a lifetime of familial love. Even when Elie discovers the death of his father in the morning, he experiences through a sense of absence: not only his father’s absence, as his bunk is now occupied by another inmate, but also the lack of his own human response: “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...” (112) Night is offers a stark psychological account the process of human and moral degradation in inhumane conditions. Even the relatively few and fortunate survivors of the Nazi atrocities, such as Elie, became doubly victimized: the victims of everything they suffered at the hands of their oppressors and the victims of everything they witnessed others suffer and were unable or, perhaps more sadly, unwilling to help. Although Night focuses on the loss of humanity in the Nazi concentration camps, the author’s life would become a quest for regaining it again, in far better conditions, if at least one condition is met: caring about the suffering of others. As Wiesel explains to his audience on December 10, 1986 during his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Oslo, his message to his son--and his message to the world at large—is about the empathy required to keep the Holocaust memory alive. He reminds us all, “that I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. … We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (118). Claudia Moscovici, Holocaust Memory