Night

Night is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–45, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. This hauntingly dark novel is one that puts you in the shoes of a victim of the Holocaust. An emotionally driven novel, Elie Wiesel expresses the pain and anger and hopelessness he felt as a 16 year-old during World War Two. Though this can be some what of an emotionally difficult autobiography, it is one that is enlightening and makes us hold our families closer, appreciate the world we have even more.

## Book Reviews

**Kirkus Review:** "Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance."

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/elie-wiesel/night-5/

**The Guardian:** "One of the most horrifying memoirs ever written, *Night* was first published in English in 1960. To mark Wiesel's 80th birthday, the Nobel laureate's wife, Marion, has produced a new translation. In stark, simple language, he describes what happened to him and to his family. It is hard to imagine anything more hellish than the picture he paints of his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau: "Huge flames were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children."

Throughout, Wiesel conveys a collective sense of disbelief that "disciplined, educated men" could commit such crimes. In a key scene, he tells how one of Sighet's Jews, Moishe, had been deported to Poland in 1942. Moishe and his companions had dug their own graves before being shot and left for dead. But Moishe had somehow survived and returned to Sighet to warn his friends. Yet nobody would believe him.

As the events of the 1940s slip ever further away, they become harder to comprehend and imagine. In his foreword, Wiesel explains why he felt compelled to write *Night*, saying his "duty is to bear witness for the dead *and* for the living". He has done more than most to keep alive their memory." -Phil Mongredien

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/20/night-elie-wiesel

## Activities

The Holocaust was a tragedy in human history that can never be erased. We feel the repercussions of this horrifying nightmare even today. But how much do we really know about the Holocaust? This activity will help you explore how much you really know about the Holocaust, and can expose what you don't know.

http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/teaching/

## Other Links

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiAghZHLXyE

Oprah and Elie Wiesel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FONfCP4NyQ4