Night

by Elie Wiesel

book data

41,251 ratings, 4.28 average rating, 4,216 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		47%
4		35%
3		13%
2		2%
1		0%

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published

January 16th 2006 (first published 1958) by Hill & Wang

binding

120 pages

literary awards

1986 Nobel Peace Prize

isbn

0374500010 (isbn13: 9780374500016)

description

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the...more

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07/29/08

Kim rated it:

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in April, 2009

There is little that freaks me out more than the Holocaust. And I'm not belittling it at all with the phrase 'freaks me out.' Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I felt sufficiently desensitized enough by television violence to be able to gage how often I need to shake the jiffy pop and run to the bathroom before the program/violence resumes.

Elie Wiesel's Night brings me back to my senses, makes me hate the cold hearted bitch I've learned to be. And not by some overtly dr...more

Like this review? yes (18 people liked it)

6 comments

03/26/08

Martine rated it:

bookshelves: continental-european, historical-fiction, history, memoirs, war

Read in July, 2008

This book has garnered so many five-star reviews and deals with such important subject matter that it almost feels like an act of heresy to give it a mere four stars. Yet that is exactly what I'm going to do, for while Night is a chilling account of the Holocaust and the dehumanisation and brutalisation of the human spirit under extreme circumstances, the fact remains that I've read better ones. Better written ones, and more insightful ones, too.

Night is Elie Wiesel's somewhat fictio...more This book has garnered so many five-star reviews and deals with such important subject matter that it almost feels like an act of heresy to give it a mere four stars. Yet that is exactly what I'm going to do, for while Night is a chilling account of the Holocaust and the dehumanisation and brutalisation of the human spirit under extreme circumstances, the fact remains that I've read better ones. Better written ones, and more insightful ones, too.

Night is Elie Wiesel's somewhat fictionalised account of the year he spent at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It's a chilling story about his experiences in and between concentration camps, his gradual loss of faith (he was a very observant Jew who obviously wondered where God was while his people were being exterminated), and his feelings of guilt when he realised that his struggle for survival was making him insensitive towards his dying father. It's gruesome, chilling material, and I felt very quiet after having read it. Yet I also felt vaguely unsatisfied with the book. I wanted more detail. I wanted fleshed-out writing rather than a succession of meaningful one-line paragraphs. I wanted less heavy-handed symbolism (the book very much centres on troubled father-and-son relationships, to echo the one central Father-and-Son one) and more actual feeling. I wanted a writer (and a translator) who knew better than to call an SS officer 'an SS'. And most of all, I wanted a less abrupt ending. I wanted to ask Wiesel what happened in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald. I wanted to ask him what happened to his leg, on which he marched for several gruesome days just days after having undergone an operation, and how he picked up the pieces afterwards, and why on earth his two eldest sisters, who died in Auschwitz as well as his mother and younger sister, never warranted more than a single mention. The latter was an example of seriously shoddy writing, I thought.

Perhaps my questions were answered in the original version of Night, which never got published. In his introduction to the new English translation of Night, Wiesel mentions that the book as it is today is a severely abridged version of a much longer Yiddish original called And the World Remained Silent. I think I can see why the original wasn't published (quite apart from the fact that the world wasn't ready yet for concentration camp literature, the few quotes provided in the introduction make for heavy reading). The abridged version definitely seems more readable than the full-length one, and does an admirable job getting the facts across. Even so, I think the publishers might have gone a step too far in abridging the book to the extent that they did. No doubt the very brevity of Night is one of the reasons why it's so popular today, but personally, I would have liked to see a middle road between the original (detailed) manuscript and the incredibly spare barebones version sold now. Don't get me wrong, the abridged version is effective, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the Holocaust for people with short attention spans. I prefer Primo Levi and Ella Lingens-Reiner's more complete accounts of life in the camps myself, not to mention several Dutch books which sadly never got translated into other languages.

But still. Night is an important book, and one that deserves to be widely read. In fact, one that should be widely read, by people of all ages and nationalities, to prevent nightmare like this ever happening again. (less)

Like this review? yes (15 people liked it)

19 comments

12/12/07

Xysea rated it:

bookshelves: book-on-home-shelf, memoir

Read in July, 2008

recommends it for: history buffs, almost anyone, really

What can I say that hasn't already been said?

This book is the newer translation, with some clarifications to the chronology of people and events, with introductions by Wiesel himself and the man who fought to have the book published, Francois Mauriac.

The prose is in a relatively simple style. After all, the story is dramatic enough; it needs no embellishment. It is as if you are watching the whole thing through a plate-glass window, and you're banging on it, yelling, 'H...more

Like this review? yes (9 people liked it)

4 comments

01/12/08

Sean Gray rated it:

Read in December, 2007

recommended to Sean by: the michigan state board of education
recommends it for: eh

Night, was possibly one of the worst books I've ever read. I was suprised when I logged on to find, Five star reviews of this book. Yeah, so it was written by a holocaust survivor. It doesn't make it well written. From a literary standpoing, purely. It was terrible. As Ms. Hawley would say, It lacked sentence variation. Maybe it was better when it was written in German? Maybe he should have let a "professional" writer, write it for him. I'm not bashing him, or his writing. Kind of. His...more

Like this review? yes (9 people liked it)

19 comments

09/27/07

Ancilla rated it:

How come there are people in this world who questioned that NAZI and holocaust really happened in the past?!!!!

Come on...
There are a lot of fact, stories and people who try to forget the nasty horrible moment which happened to them.
History is the past, which we never can change, can't we?

---------------------------------------------------

Elie Wiesel Elie Wiesel adalah salah satu saksi hidup kekejaman NAZI dengan berbagai kamp konsentrasi untuk me...more

Like this review? yes (6 people liked it)

1 comment

12/17/07

Kat rated it:

bookshelves: eyeopening

recommends it for: anyone with a soul

I teach this book yearly, but my students seemed distant from the true reality of the story. When I use the Holocaust Museum's interactive of Lola Rein's dress, it hits them. Real people, real history. The immediacy of the tragedy that was Wiesel's then comes to life in a way that a junior or senior can grasp. I also tell the story of my friend, Ida, and her "no grandparents". That is the hardest part for me as it is so personal. She was the daughter of survivors - she had no grandpare...more

Like this review? yes (6 people liked it)

3 comments

07/20/07

Daniel rated it:

Read in January, 2003

I had put off reading this story for a variety of reasons, main among them that I knew what I would be facing, and was eager to find an excuse not to. After having been to the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany, the images of the now-dead ovens still linger somewhere in the recesses of my mind, and to back to it, to read from someone who went through it, was not something I readily wanted to do. But I did; I gathered myself up and read through in a couple of days, the end of the book taking me...more

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01/07/09

Anna rated it:

Read in January, 2009

recommended to Anna by: Mrs. Recker
recommends it for: EVERY SINGLE PERSON.

I loved this book. I loved the honesty, the horror, & the truth that was revealed, by this amazing person.

I had to read this book for my English class, & boy, my English class somehow found HUMOR behind this book. I was thoroughly agitated by their finding this funny. NOTHING was funny in this book. NOTHING is funny about what Hitler did. & NOTHING is funny about the burning of human bodies or especially BABIES, while they're STILL ALIVE.

I wanted to punch ever...more

Like this review? yes (5 people liked it)

6 comments

05/11/08

Lorena rated it:

bookshelves: gringolombian-bookclub

Read in May, 2008

recommended to Lorena by: Sandra

If there is one book genre I dislike is biographies, in general I find biographies too suspicious, after all how do I know the writer kept a neutral view of his subject? And I find auto-biographies self serving, how many times you find page after page of the whining of people who paint a picture of their lives as horrific only to overcome it all to become … a mediocre writer, and we are supposed to feel amazed, sorry, I know exactly how I sound. So you have, in my opinion the victims who want...more If there is one book genre I dislike is biographies, in general I find biographies too suspicious, after all how do I know the writer kept a neutral view of his subject? And I find auto-biographies self serving, how many times you find page after page of the whining of people who paint a picture of their lives as horrific only to overcome it all to become … a mediocre writer, and we are supposed to feel amazed, sorry, I know exactly how I sound. So you have, in my opinion the victims who want recognition, the superheroes who want attention, and the finger pointers who don’t want to take responsibility, only to find a few weeks later that the writer was a little flex on his facts or a little too creative on his accounts.
This book is not the case. Here the writer doesn’t want recognition, he’s not the hero of his story, and as I read I felt I was reading more of an investigative piece than a biography. His account is so moving and it touched strings I forgot I had in my heart. I have read many pieces about the Holocaust and I always find them heartbreaking, but here Mr. Wiesel not only presents the separation and anxiety of his circumstances, but also the disbelief that these horrific events could take place in our modern era.
I found myself wondering page after page how could this have happened? I found Mr. Wiesel’s voice in my head just saying why is no one doing anything? And slowly instead of sadness I became really angry, because I couldn’t understand how the guards were following these directions without question, how the soldiers did these things without blinking, how the Kopa cooperated, I became angry at their neighbors who look upon them being taken, at his parents for not running away. I then became angry at myself because I let things like this happen too, today, now … they are happening, they are there for us to see and we know, and yet we do nothing. Not much has changed, human rights are being violated everyday in Darfur, racial killings happen in Azerbaijan daily, systematic starvation is common place in South Africa as a means of extermination by the guerrillas who control the region, drug lords torture and kill thousands to get their way in Colombia, EVERY DAY ... and we do nothing. I wonder if History will look at our generation with the same disgust I look upon the generation that let the Jewish people suffer this way. I wonder if this is just human nature and we are condemned to let the worst of us do these things, while the rest lives their happy lives untouched.
(less)

Like this review? yes (4 people liked it)

2 comments

01/04/09

Eric_W rated it:

bookshelves: biography-memoir

We used this book for a class I was co-teaching which attempted to measure learning outcomes of community college students. It's an excellent book for getting discussions going and seeing how students relate to events of which they have no experience. As a holocaust book, however, I think there are better books out there, but to get a real sense it's important to read many. I still find Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil to be one of the most significant. T...more

Like this review? yes (4 people liked it)

6 comments

03/08/09

Daniel rated it:

(review of isbn 0553272535)

bookshelves: re-read

Read in March, 2009

Elie Wiesel's "Night" is such a widely read book, there's no need to describe the book itself. I'll instead focus here on my thoughts on rereading it for the first time since, if I remember correctly, I was a teenager. While I grew up hearing Holocaust survivors speak at my Hebrew school, seeing documentaries on the concentration camps, and spending a lot of time with the poems and pictures in "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," Wiesel's book likely was the first adult book I re...more Elie Wiesel's "Night" is such a widely read book, there's no need to describe the book itself. I'll instead focus here on my thoughts on rereading it for the first time since, if I remember correctly, I was a teenager. While I grew up hearing Holocaust survivors speak at my Hebrew school, seeing documentaries on the concentration camps, and spending a lot of time with the poems and pictures in "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," Wiesel's book likely was the first adult book I read by a Holocaust survivor, followed not long after by Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" and others. I've since had the chance to visit a couple concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Wiesel was imprisoned.

"Night," it seems, has become the standard text for trying to understand what it was like to be in a concentration camp. This, I think, speaks to both the book's strength and, perhaps, its chief weakness, particularly for a reader with more than a rudimentary understanding of the death camps and the Holocaust. "Night" could be, with few details changed, the story of nearly any Auschwitz survivor. This is partly unavoidable: Life in the camps was so dehumanizing that prisoners lost their individuality, with personalities given over to the all-encompassing fight for survival.

Nevertheless, for a reader already well-educated on concentration-camp life -- and, to be fair, such a person has likely already read "Night" as part of his or her education -- the book feels a bit too generic. Such a reader, and I would consider myself one at this point, would be better served by a book with a bit more individuality -- one by someone whose position within the camps gave him a unique perspective, or whose experience before entering or after leaving the camps provided a point of view different from that of other survivors.

I think I will next try Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," a book that's also something of a classic but I hadn't heard of until a year ago or so. Unlike other Holocaust memoirs I've read, "This Way" was written not by a Jew but by a prisoner put in the concentration camps for being a subversive.

I would still highly recommend "Night" for anyone who's read little about life in the death camps, or hasn't yet read a survivor's account. Nothing I've said is intended to criticize "Night"'s position in the canon. But it's definitely a starting point, not a destination, in one's education on the subject.(less)

Like this review? yes (4 people liked it)

4 comments

01/11/08

Heather rated it:

bookshelves: book-club-selections, fiction

Read in April, 2008

recommends it for: everyone

I read this book almost entirely in one sitting. It felt like seeing a horrible accident that had just taken place, or watching craniofacial surgery on television--you want to close your eyes and block it out, but part of you just can't turn away. I know I will be haunted by some of the things I read in this book for a long time--but that is probably the price we should all pay to make sure something like the Holocaust can never happen again on this earth.

I honestly cannot compre...more

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07/04/07

Emanuel rated it:

bookshelves: nonfiction

I might too stingy in giving stars for this book. A friend of mind recommended the book to me. My rating for this book doesn't mean that I discredited the book or dislike it. The book is good, and i love memoirs, especially those slice of life true story with past experiences, no matter if it's good or bad or worse experiences.

Weeks after i finished "Night", I got a dvd of movie called "Fateless", the movie is really good, but, the story very similar to Wiesel's "...more

Like this review? yes (3 people liked it)

2 comments

05/29/07

Jennifer Randall rated it:

(review of isbn 0553272535)

Read in March, 2006

Elie Wisel (won '86 Nobel Peace Prize) a Holocaust survivor tells of the unending hell he and his father (and family) endured at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Only Elie makes it out alive, and surpisingly, his father lasts throughout the year, or so, of sheer torment.

The book's theme quietly hints at one of the main objections to Christianity, and probably, Judaism: how could a loving God let such tragedies occur? Elie struggles iwht this throughout. In fact, ...more

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03/26/09

Savannah Rybski rated it:

bookshelves: book-club

Read in July, 2008

recommends it for: Any age group

Night by Elie Wiesel tells the story of a young boy and his father during the Holocaust. He and his father leave his mother and sisters behind, as they head to another concentration camp for men. They loose faith in their religion, and are given small rations of food. However, they coninue to fight and put up with the Holocaust. Fences is a great book because it allows you to understand the hardships that Holocaust victims faced then and continue to face today. Even though I read Night for schoo...more

Like this review? yes (3 people liked it)

6 comments

02/26/09

Miguel rated it:

bookshelves: european-literature

Read in April, 2009

Elie Wiesel (Night),

When the French writer Francois Mauriac met to Elie Wiesel ( A Jew survival from the concentration camp of Auschwitz, during the World War II), Mauriac immediately recognized in the cold gaze of Wiesel, the living testimony of heroism, human survival, and unconditional faith to life of an young Jew, victim of the most oppressive circumstances of death never before existed, struggling in the most frightening human circumstances, his unconditional right to live as...more

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01/08/09

Ben rated it:

(review of isbn 1419390694)

bookshelves: audio, darkness, favorites, good-nonfiction, read-in-2009, war

Read in January, 2009

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

This is a heart wrenching true account of a Hungarian Jewish boy going through the Holocaust. One can't even imagine the horrible things that normal, typical human beings are capable of - how they act when it comes down to their survival: trampling on dying men, beating up and taking food from men too weak to defend themselves. Worse yet, and even further from the imagination, is how awful human beings can be when they are not fighting for their life: putting babies in furnaces, killing childr...more

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02/11/08

HRH rated it:

Read in February, 2008

This book was short but very difficult to get through. It isn't the sort of thing one likes to read after a hard day at work. It tells the true story of Elie Wiesel, a Romanian Jew who, at age 15, survived the horrors of four Nazi concentration camps between 1944 and 1945. And it ended abruptly which made me scour the internet for more information or some time of happier ending. The book was terrifying. With every incident I had to remind myself that this was not a novel, but a memoir and that,...more

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01/17/08

Jennem rated it:

bookshelves: non-fiction

In the preface to the newest translation of Night, Elie Wiesel writes, "If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one."

I love to read. Books are like air to me. Books are my vice. All kinds of books. Classics. Biographies. Romance. Memoirs. Chick-lit. Books on politics. Mysteries. So long as the literary style is readable, I'll read it, whatever it might be.

But if, in my lifetime, I was to read only one book, Night would be that book.
...more

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06/13/08

Ali rated it:

It was interesting to contrast Wiesel's experience in Nazi concentration camps with some of the other accounts that I have read. Specifically, Viktor Frankle's account kept flashing up. These two individuals had very different responses to their experiences-- Frankle learned and grew from his horrific days and weeks and months in the camps, while Wiesel became bitter and hardened. I had to keep reminding myself that Wiesel was one of the first victims to record and share the horrors of Nazi c...more

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The Pearl

2 votes 3.5%

Mythology

2 votes 3.5%

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14 votes 24.6%

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37 votes 64.9%

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quotes from this book

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night…Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never." More quotes...