Night [平装]

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 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.

Spot Reviews
1.Powerful is an understatement, January 18, 2006
Reviewer: FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA)

I recall when I first read 'Night', it was just after Elie Wiesel had given a lecture at my university. It was in the mid-1980s, and the lecture hall was standing-room-only. Wiesel's presentation moved us to tears, and moved us to anger, and moved me to want to follow up on his words by reading what he had written.

This is supposed to be fiction, but in a style that seems to be typical of many modern Israeli novelists, it is so close to the truth of the actual events that transpired in Wiesel's life that it might as well be treated as autobiographical. This is actually part of a trilogy - Night, Dawn, and The Accident - although each element stands alone with integrity.

How does one deal with survival after such atrocities as that at Birkenau and Auschwitz? How can one have faith in the world? How can one accept that a people so closely identified with a powerful God can ever accept that God again? Where is God in the midst of such things?

Wiesel himself as spent his life in search of such answers, but doesn't provide them here. Why then would one want to read such accounts as these? Wiesel was silent for many years, until he was brought into speech and writing as a witness to the events. Wiesel proclaims that there is in the world now a new commandment - 'Thou shalt not stand idly by' - when such things are happening, one must act. One must remember the past in all its personal aspects to both honour those who suffered and to forestall such things happening again (which, given the the depressing repetitive nature of history, is a difficult task).

This is the longest short book I've ever read. It is one that has stayed with me from the first page, and I've never been able to shake the images brought forward, the misery and suffering, the existence of evil and brutality, the sadness and desolation. We live in a culture that likes to gloss over pain and suffering, mask it with drugs and other things, and always end the story with a happy ending.

There is no happy ending here - even Wiesel's own survival is a questionable good here. How does one live after this? How does the world go on?

One thing is certain, we must never forget, and this book is part of that active remembering that we are called to do.

2.Incredible Journey Into the Dark Night of the Soul, January 18, 2006
Reviewer: Robert W. Kellemen "Doc. K." (Crown Point, IN United States)

Elie Wiesel's narrative of his own one-year experience spent in a concentration camp has appropriately become a classic in the field. Read it to find meaning in a seeming meaningless life. Read "Night" if you are going through your own "dark night of the soul" and want to find an answer to the perennial question, "Where is God?" Read "Night" if you think deeply about life and how it often falls on us and crushes us. Don't read "Night" only if you have a queasy stomach or the need to think that this life is a bed of roses.

Wiesel discovered that, "God is there in the suffering." His explanation is anything but trite. Instead, it grapples candidly with the confusion that life can and does bring. Fortunately Wiesel's candor leads to hope--the confidence that behind the evils in this life there resides a good God working out plans in a mysterious, yet glorious, way. The inner depths and black darkness of "Night" call us not to squeamish forgetting but to stark remembering. For only in remembering will we insist, "Never again!"

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Soul Physicians,"Spiritual Friends,"Biblical Psychology," and the forthcoming "Beyond the Suffering."

Customer Reviews
1.Hitler is the only one who kept his promises to the Jews, December 25, 2006
Reviewer: J. Adams "History buff" (Washington, DC USA)

I read this book when it first came out in the 60's and it made big impression on a young high-schooler. When I visited Dachau a few years later after joining the USAF, I remembered the line from this book that was spoken by a dying Jew who was in the hospital with Wiesel at one of the death camps he fought to live in, that " I've got more faith in Hitler than anyone else. Hitler is the only one who kept all his promises to the Jews.

When i first read this book I was mad at the Nazis for their inhumanity, but after many decades I learned to redirect and balance my anger at those who led themselves like sheep to the slaughter. Wiesel has an interesting chapter at the beginning of this book about Moshe the Beadle, who escaped death at the hands of the Nazis and returned to tell the Jewish community in Hungary about how vulnerable they were. His advice was ignored, and when the sheep were rounded up, they went without a fight as they were rounded up to go to their deaths, delusional to the end about their fate.

What I did not remember about this book was that the Jewish sheep fought and scratched, and even killed their own for a scrap of bread, but did not think that they would best be served to act like humans instead of sheep and fight back as many did in the Warsaw ghetto.

Wiesel's descriptions in the book are fundamentally the story of those who would only take bread from the weakest of the flock as they moved from camp to camp, knowing that their ultimate fate was to die at the hands of the Nazis in the ovens. A scrap of bread to live another day was the trade-off for their own claim to humanity. It is essentially a study of human cowardice on a grand scale.

I can now understand why this weakness only encouraged the bullies, just as other weak leaders such as the New York Times owners praise the United Nations, which is only united in calling for the end of Israel and the death of the remaining Jews on the planet. But just as millions of Jews got on the trains taking them to their deaths did so without a fight during the Nazi era, millions more are repeating history by ignoring the fact that sheep do not eat wolf stew. It goes the other way round.

I gave this book three stars because it is an average. The descriptions of the horrors of what the Nazis did, as well as what the Jewish inmates did to each other to survive deserves five stars, but Wiesel is essentially clueless in understanding how his own actions and those of his fellow Jews made them less than human, and thus reinforced the view of many Europeans that they deserved the ovens that they tended as prisoners until they were too weak to load their own parents bodies into the furnaces and added to the flames when they were finally selected for the gas chambers.

Nothing has changed, with the leader of Iran calling for the destruction of Israel, and the USA being the lone voice calling out for the UN to condemn anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism. And indeed you have people such as the ambassador from France calling Israel a "shi**y little country" unworthy of a future, and dozens of American Democrats and other politicians demanding that the US join the "international community" in condemning Israel for defending itself.

Wiesel did what he did to survive, as did millions of other Jews, but their weakness invited the bullies to depravity, just as it does today. I suspect that the chorus will be the same once the Iranian nukes wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. This book is a study in how they will have brought it on themselves by acting like sheep instead of humans. And of course the world will look the other way, just as Clinton did when the Hutus slaughtered nearly a million Tutsi's but chose not to get involved. His approval ratings are off the charts, even though the holocaust in Rwanda was more intense over a few months than Hitler's was against the Jews over a decade.

C'est la mort.

2.Night, December 15, 2006
Reviewer: Damian Kelleher (Brisbane, Australia)

Elie Wiesel was fifteen when he was taken from his home in Sighet. In April 1945, when he was sixteen, Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp near Weimar, in Germany. Night, the first book in a trilogy, is Wiesel's 'deposition' of what he experienced during that time. It is a harrowing, careful, terrible masterpiece, a quiet outrage of a novel that is required reading for anyone who is not only interested in the Holocaust, or in fine literature, but for anyone who is interested in living.

Sighet, a small Hungarian-Romanian town, has vague ideas about the Second World War, the Germans, and the Russians. They are mostly unaware of what is happening to the Jewish people of Europe. When Moishe the Beadle, a man who 'was as awkward as a clown. His waiflike shyness made people smile.', is taken away for being a foreign Jew, the town barely gives it a thought. Upon his return, 'the joy in his eyes was gone'. Moishe pleads with his fellow townsfolk to listen. He implores them to flee, to run as far away from the encroaching German empire as possible. But, nobody listens.

Soon, the Jews of Sighet are taken to Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father are separated from his mother and younger sister, Tzipora. He never saw them again.

Slowly, the adolescent Wiesel comes to learn the ways of Auschwitz. If asked, he is to tell the SS officers that he is eighteen, not fifteen. You must say that you are in good health, even if you are not. Bread, when it arrives, should be eaten sparingly. If you can save some for later, do so. New shoes will be confiscated. These simple rules become his life. He learns quickly that there is no time for hope, or for dreams. When existence is boiled down to its very essence, when a swallow of water or a crust of bread becomes the most important part of the day, there can be nothing but hunger and sleep in your life. Wiesel measures time with his stomach, his entire being becomes focused around hunger.

What happens to those who are not strong, or who are too young, or too old? What happens to those who talk back, or rebel, or fail to work? With calm, precise sentences, we learn that they are shot in the head, or burned in a furnace, or poisoned, or gassed. How can a fifteen year old learn such horrible things? How can anyone? Wiesel was at an age when he should be learning of death and sadness in literature and music, not inhaling the black cinders of his fellow Jews as the furnaces belched their evil smoke.

We follow Wiesel as he travels with his father from Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. Wiesel grapples with his faith, wondering how his God could permit such a thing to happen. But there is also something more, and less, that his conscience has to ponder. As his father becomes progressively weaker, as more and more men die and are discarded, he must decide whether to support his father, or to ensure his own survival. There are times when '...a thought crept into my mind: If only I couldn't find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival, to take care only of myself...Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever.'

While the majority of the novel is spent with Wiesel and his father, there are times when we learn the flashes of other men's stories. We learn of a man who was forced to shovel his own father into the furnaces. We learn of another man, an old man, who hoarded some bread for his son. But his son thought he was keeping it from him, and they fought, and the old man died. Killed by his own son for a piece of bread. Was it justice then, that the son was killed by other men, desperate for food? No. It can't be. There is no justice in a concentration camp.

Wiesel writes with short, simple sentences. There is nothing overly complicated in the way he writes, perhaps because the subject matter is complicated enough. There are a number of reasons why the language used was so universal. Anyone who is capable to read, can complete this work - a child could understand the words, though not the meaning. But more than that, by distilling what happened into mundane, everyday words, the experience of Auschwitz and the concentration camps becomes something that we can all, in some way, understand. Flowery language and cumbrous metaphor would have diluted the impact of the words, as readers struggled to understand the meaning behind the prose. But this way, the clean simplicity of the text allows it to be understood in clear, defined terms. There can be no mistaking the horror of what has happened. There can be no mistaking the impossible sadness.

Wiesel's novel stands as a chronicle of a terrible time in the history of man. With a steady hand and clear vision, Wiesel has portrayed the terrors of the Holocaust in a manner that does not seek to judge, but to teach. As a youth desperate to understand, Wiesel uses the text to contemplate what it is that would allow such an event to occur. Where in man lies the core that created Auschwitz, Buchenwald, furnaces and mass graves? Wiesel doesn't - cannot - give an answer, but what he has given us is a measured, reasoned plea that we should not forget.

From his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, in 1986: 'We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.' The great sadness of World War II was that we knew, but did nothing. We knew, but remained neutral. We knew, but chose to ignore. There is no excuse grand enough for such behaviour, and it is with this book that Wiesel condemns those who looked away. We must face what darkness emerges from the depths of men, we must face it and we must defeat it, lest another Auschwitz - or worse - occur. It is our duty, and our responsibility.