Back to the Classics Challenge
Title: Night
Author: Elie Wiesel
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Acquired Via: Library (Kayla) & Personal Collection (Amber)
Release Date: 1960
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
Our Review
Night by Elie Wiesel is the first book that we have chosen to read for our Back to the Classics Challenge.
Kayla: I'm glad that we read Night first because it was the book I was most likely to put off reading. (I swear I didn't - January was a busy month.) The Holocaust always makes me extremely emotional, but I was surprised by my lack of reaction to Night. Don't get me wrong, I was horrified by the situations Elie Wiesel faced, but I never cried. How did the book make you feel?
Amber: Mostly I felt sad and angry while reading it. Obviously sad about everything that Wiesel went through, but also just that it happened and it happened to so many people. But also sad for the things that Wiesel lost besides his family and his possessions. He lost his faith in himself and in his God. He also lost a little of his humanity. I'm also angry that there are still people in the world that believe that the Holocaust never happened. Then, I just thought it was so crazy that at the beginning of Night, Wiesel talks about how the people he knew were saying that they didn't believe that Hitler was really going to kill the Jewish people. Then they let the Nazis into their homes, then they let the Nazis kick them out of their homes, etc. I wonder if it was because they wanted to believe that human beings couldn't be that awful. Or if they, like most people, think that something bad will never happen to them.
Do you think that your lack of reaction was due to how Night was written? To me, it seemed very matter-of-fact and almost clinical.