June 2020 Classic of the Month: 'Night'
- Caroline Selby
- Jun 13, 2020
- 2 min read
How Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir will break your heart over and over again.
The classic of the month for June 2020 is Night by Elie Wiesel. This semi-autobiographical Holocaust book is an unforgettable read that I read about two years ago.
Narrated by Eliezer, a Jewish teenager, this book tells a very real and personal account of Elie Wiesel’s own experience in the Holocaust. The story opens on Eliezer’s life in his hometown, Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. He spends his days studying the Torah, until his life becomes uprooted in the spring of 1944.
The Nazis begin to occupy Hungary, with more and more restrictions being passed, until Eliezer and all of the other Jews are forced onto trains and shipped off to Birkenau.
Eliezer’s arrival at Birkenau is just the first of many heart-wrenching events. Him and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, who they will never again see. Eliezer and his father go through countless inspections and are stripped and shaved.
In one of, if not, the most gut-wrenching and jarring scenes in the book, Eliezer watches on with sadness and disgust as a group of Nazis set fire to truckloads of Jewish babies in an open pit.
Quickly moved to Auschwitz and put to work in horrible conditions, Eliezer and everyone around him are completely stripped of their humanity, receiving endless beatings. The Jews hold onto their religion and community, as a way of comforting and supporting each other. Trapped in a hell rampant with death, Eliezer can’t help but begin to lose his faith in God and those around him.
After months in Auschwitz, the Jewish prisoners are forced to run a stretch over fifty miles long to Gleiwitz, another concentration camp, in a freezing snowstorm. Once there, around one hundred Jews board a train to the Buchenwald concentration camp, yet once the destination is reached, only 12 living remain.
At Buchenwald, the last stop on a hellish journey, Eliezer’s father dies, yet Eliezer survives, barely, until the American army’s liberation of the camp on April 11, 1945.
Although the ending to Elie Wiesel’s both written and actual stories aren’t entirely devoid of hope, the year-long experience that Elie and his character go through is emotionally draining, and, at times, hard to read.
There is a vast amount of books written about the Holocaust, and in all different forms. There are romances, historical fiction books, biographies, memoirs, etc., and I have read quite a few of them. Night particularly stands out to me because it is a memoir. Although the story explains Eliezer’s experience, the book is truly Elie Wiesel’s story.
Night shows the loss of innocence in a truly terrifying way. This story is deeply personal, and truly makes the reader feel the agony that was the Holocaust.
Being only 109 pages long, there is no excuse to not read this book. Although the story is undeniably heart-wrenching and tragic in ways that words can’t even begin to describe, Night by Elie Wiesel is a moving memoir that will make you truly question humanity.
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