Night: Book Review By: Ruijing

KEYWORDS: Memoir, WWII, Concentration Camps

The book Night is a memoir based on the author's, Elie Wiesel's, Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps for the Jewish people during the end of WWII. 

The story opens with the Nazis occupying Eliezer’s (Elie Wiesel's) hometown, Sighet, in Transylvania, Hungary. Under Hitler’s prophecy of "annihilating the Jewish race from all Europe", all Jews in Eliezer’s town were soon ordered out to the ghettos and later deported to Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp.

Life in Auschwitz was onerous and excruciating. Prisoners were required to work every day tirelessly and laboriously only for the tiniest bits of bread rations. Selections were also made regularly. Only the "healthy", and "effective" prisoners deserve to keep working in the camp; the "useless" and ill ones will immediately be thrown into crematoria and annihilated. Numerous of Elizer’s inmates passed away.

Elizer’s life is a mishap but also a fortune. God blessed him to survive the murderous conditions of the camp. Yet his price was to lose almost all his sense of humanities at the age of 14. From pious to skeptical of his beliefs, from fear to numbness when facing death. The adversity grinded his identity and features. It’s not that these changes follow his will, but the perpetual mental and physical torment had already devoured him. Even on the night his father passed away due to dysentery on the cot under him, his instant reactions were not to weep but to be numb and relieved.

In my opinion, the book isn’t a hard read. There weren’t many characters to remember, or even if there were, most died before the reader could remember them.

However, that doesn’t mean this book isn’t worthy of reading. Hitler, the Nazis, and the Jewish people aren’t typically the topics I, as a teen living in the 21st century, think about every day, but the story makes me start ruminating about whether there are actually disparities between races around the globe. In the story, all of the Jewish characters are being tortured for their identities. They were facing genocide for their beliefs and who they were. The story was gruesome, yet this was the truth of history, dark and cruel.

The message of this novel is strong. Overall, I would rate this book a 9/10. Not only simply because the memoir was a fascinating piece of literature itself but also to recognize the dauntless courage of the author himself to write and publish the story. Not everyone will have the bravery to recall those miserable memories and reminisce about all the bloody details of pain and torture. However, Wiesel did it; it was he who chose to become the speaker for all the innocent lives lost during the Holocaust and to tell the world about the unimaginable brutality coerced on the Jewish people in the camps.