Night

Wiesel, Elie. Night. 2006. 120p. ISBN 0-374-50001-0. Available at B WIE on the library shelves.

Elie Wiesel is a teenager in Sighet, a town in Transylvania. Once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the whole area was transferred to Romania in 1920, but reoccupied by the Hungarians in 1940. At first, the large Jewish population of the town is not worried, despite the rumors they hear from other countries under Nazi occupation. Life goes on in Sighet. Then in 1941, the Hungarians expelled Jews who were not citizens. One of them escapes capture in Poland and returns to warn the Jews of Sighet of the Nazis’ plan to kill them all. They ignore him.

Then, in 1944, Hungary, which had been an ally of Nazi Germany, seeks peace with the Allies. As a result, the Germans invade the country. Suddenly, life becomes dangerous for the Jews. Elie’s family is forced to wear the yellow star. Their assets are seized, but his father manages to bury the family fortune. Then they are expelled from Sighet and placed in cattle carts to Auschwitz, the infamous concentration camp.

The Wiesels are separated by gender, and this is the last time Elie sees his mother and younger sister alive. Elie and his father do everything to look after each other, but life in the camp is horrific and filled with pain, suffering, and death. As life devolves and the front moves closer, the Germans are becoming anxious to leave. The entire camp is evacuated and forced to walk for days to another camp deeper in Germany called Buchenwald. Elie did not think life could get any worse, but it does. Despite the beatings and the suffering, however, Elie continues to fight to survive until he witnesses the death of his father, beaten by other inmates.

As the camp is prepared once again to evacuate, the Americans arrive and free the prisoners. Elie has survived the war, but at a terrible psychological cost.

A seminal work on the Holocaust, Wiesel makes life in the concentration camp real and horrific. Several questions raised by him continue to be relevant even more than 70 years later, and it remains one of the most read stories of the Second World War. You can read more about survivors of the Nazis concentration camps in Wiesel, Wisenthal, Klardsfeld: The Holocaust Survivors.