Night by Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel is the Nobel Peace Prize-winning personal account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps as an adolescent. It is a very short book, but immensely powerful.

As with most talk of the Holocaust, no matter what I write here can begin to capture the horror of those terrible times. Every word seems to be an insufficient testament to man's basic inhumanity. Perhaps what I find more terrifying than "just" the killing, was the methodical and precise (though often arbitrary) way the genocide was carried out by the Nazis. This wasn't just knee-jerk killings in the streets due to anti-Semitism. This was well-thought out, planned, and executed government policy. It beggars the imagination.

What struck me most about Night was the spareness of its language (in English translation). No punches were pulled, no unnecessary prose was used. The story was as bare as the experience. Everything is stripped away. There is no time for extra words. Extra words are an unaffordable luxury. One must tell the story. One must bear witness. Perhaps the strongest contribution of Night was that it inspired other Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, so that we never forget what happened in those camps.

Wiesel lived in the Transylvania region of Hungary. Things went along fine for his town during the war until 1944. That's when the Nazis showed up in Budapest and the "evacuation" of those Jews began. First they were forced from their homes into ghettoes and then loaded into cattle cars and shipped like so much cargo to the concentration camps. Wiesel and his father were separated from his mother and sister at Birkenau. He and his father were then marched to Auschwitz. I have to stop here and say that the writing on the gate of Auschwitz (and the facsimile of the gate at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) is one of the things that angers me most in the world. Arbeit Macht Frei (work will make you free). The most cynical words ever set into form. There was no chance, no prayer, no way that work would make these inmates free. It was a lie on a colossal scale. I'm grinding my teeth now just typing this. I don't know how I could have dealt with seeing it as an inmate. Frankly, I probably couldn't have afforded the anger.

Wiesel goes on to describe how life in the camp became nothing but a quest for survival. He even, in his mind, abandoned his filial duties. His life revolved around how to avoid the blows of the guards, how to get food and water, how to get sleep, and how to avoid illness. The bleakest, sparest existence possible.

Finally, Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald camp. The Nazis fled after inmate resistance late in the war. American troops arrived the next day. Wiesel's father had alread died.

Night is a tremendously powerful book. Like many other Holocaust survivor stories, it should be required reading. We cannot forget what happened and we are bound to do our best to prevent anything like it from happening again.