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Night (The Night Trilogy #1)

by Elie Wiesel, Marion Wiesel (Translator)

4.25 of 5 stars 4.25 · rating details · 321,074 ratings · 12,085 reviews

Night A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this...more

Paperback, 120 pages

Published January 16th 2006 by Hill and Wang (first published 1955)

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Feb 17, 2013 Kim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: for-realz, cultured, mmix, war, rubbernecking

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 gauge 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 dramatic rendition of the ho...more

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Oct 09, 2011 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics, easton-press, audiobook, history, life-changers, literature, classics-americas, non-fiction, world-war-the-sequel, 1954-1969

This book is a hard, righteous slap in the conscience to everyone of good will in the world and should stand as a stark reminder of both: (1) the almost unimaginable brutality that we, as a species, are capable of; and (2) that when it comes to preventing or stopping similar kinds of atrocities or punishing those that seek to perpetrate such crimes, WE ARE OUR BROTHERS' KEEPERS and must take responsibility for what occurs "on our watch."

This remarkable story is the powerful and deeply moving acc...more

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Jan 23, 2013 Kristen rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Everyone

Shelves: 5-star, biographies-and-memoirs, everyone-should-read

A poignant and unforgettable 5 star read.

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” ― Elie Wiesel, Night

It's been years since I've read this book, but as my son needed to read it for school, I decided to read it with him. I'm glad I did.

Night, which is one man's tragic yet remarkable survival of the Holocaust, is a powerful, shocking, heartbreaking, poignant, yet triumph-of-the-soul biography. This book speaks to humanity about the atrocities man is capable of committing. It...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Kat rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone with a soul

Shelves: eyeopening

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 grandparents and I...more

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Jul 28, 2008 Martine rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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 acco...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)

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Aug 07, 2011 Paquita Maria Sanchez rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, truthiness

I had trouble discerning whether this book was actually incredibly well written, or just horrifyingly honest enough to shock you into awe. What I have pulled from it is less the prose, and more the images burned in my brain from the chilling facts that they express. Having read The Lost, I was at least somewhat prepared for the places Wiesel was to take me, and the terror contained within this short volume is actually minor compared to the extensive atrocities researched and transcribed by Mende...more I had trouble discerning whether this book was actually incredibly well written, or just horrifyingly honest enough to shock you into awe. What I have pulled from it is less the prose, and more the images burned in my brain from the chilling facts that they express. Having read The Lost, I was at least somewhat prepared for the places Wiesel was to take me, and the terror contained within this short volume is actually minor compared to the extensive atrocities researched and transcribed by Mendelsohn in his much larger, multiple-family account which includes photographs to get you really invested, scans of documents to validate his every statement, and transcripts of interviews with dozens of survivors to carve out a sense of emotional authenticity. At the same time, Mendelsohn did not actually go through the suffering inflicted upon the Jewish people during the Holocaust, and so with his voice comes this mildly disingenuous edge. Wiesel, on the other hand, has an authority which provides such weight to his writing that I would argue that Night, though compact and limited in scope compared to other books about Nazi cruelty toward the Jewish people of Europe, is probably the better of all the books I have read on the subject. Rather than just state the facts, Wiesel lets you in on how it really felt. He fesses up to the places that hunger and anguish can take you, to the way you can start to feel animosity toward even your own father, simply for continuing to live (and perhaps dragging you down in the process). To feeling so overwhelmed by the fear of death that you are actually emotionally void as you watch someone hanged in front of you, as at least it is one less mouth to feed, at least its not you, at least... He walks you through the guilt that inevitably follows such thoughts, and the constant meditation and self-analysis necessary to maintain your humanity in such inconceivably bleak circumstances. Attempting to imagine Wiesel finding the inner strength to voice these memories is explanation enough for what at times felt like terse phrasing. Forget harsh, I would probably be a robot if I survived something like this. I would talk. about. it. like this. If. at all. After a ten year wait, Wiesel finally decided to exorcise his demons with a scream. Well, the ones that were at all willing to leave. Read it in one sitting. I'm going to go off and figure out how to separate paragraphs now.

*To be fair, I think I may have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about Mendelsohn for that article he wrote trashing Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds. His book really is solid and engaging. I just like this one (and Quentin Tarantino) better. I mean no harm.(less)

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May 15, 2013 BirdBrian's ghost rated it 5 of 5 stars

In this primary-source document, Elie Wiesel details his personal experiences in Auschwitz. His story is unique, but the existence of concentration camps, genocide, and forced labor are not. Wiesel's story is one data point in a larger trend of 20th century, and now 21st century atrocities which share many core similarities.

1918- (The Gulag Archipelago) The roots of the Soviet internal Gulag system dates back to Czarist times, where internal deportation to Siberia was a common fate of political...more

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Jan 26, 2013 Jocelyn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, unforgettably-awesome

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Jul 07, 2008 Xysea rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: history buffs, almost anyone, really

Shelves: book-on-home-shelf, memoir

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, 'Hey, hey you, they're tryin...more

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Jan 12, 2008 Sean Gray rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: eh

Recommended to Sean by: the michigan state board of education

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 writing n...more

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Jul 22, 2007 Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars

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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Nov 26, 2012 Cathy DuPont rated it 4 of 5 stars

Since I've read a number of articles (mostly) and book excerpts about the Holocaust, I wasn't shocked by this diary of this 16 year-old Holocaust survivor. However, I found the book both very powerful and very sad. Sixteen and to have seen such a fight for life, watching friends and family murdered and dying in front of him. And questioning, where is God, has God abandoned me? Faith to believe in God is surely questioned.

Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, lost his mother, sister...more

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Sep 27, 2007 Ancilla rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: in-bahasa

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 memusnahkan etnis Yahudi di daerah Eropa (Jerman d...more

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Aug 11, 2011 Aubrey rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 3-star, reviewed, translated, non-fiction, authorness, wwii, to-re-read, yiddish, on-hand, first-in-a-series

You can't critique this book. You can like it, you can dislike it, but you can't reason out why. That would be an insult to the memory of this horrific time, and an insult to the man who lived through it and chose to cry out to the world against it. The most you can do is read it, and take away something from it. You can never fully understand the emotions this book encompasses, for the price of understanding is death, if not of the physical than of the mental. Read it, and know that this was no...more

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May 09, 2011 K.D. Oliveros rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: Oprah Book of the Month

Shelves: memoirs, holocaust, saddest

If Anne Frank was 13 when Germans came to Netherlands, Elie Wiessel was 15 when the same thing happened in Romania. Two teenage children who saw the atrocities of the German armies who were blinded by their loyalty to Hitler. There were a few differences: Anne Frank died in the concentration camp while Elie Wiessel survived. Anne Frank's diary, first published as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1950, was written in young girl's language while she was on a hiding while Night by Elie Wiesel tells the...more If Anne Frank was 13 when Germans came to Netherlands, Elie Wiessel was 15 when the same thing happened in Romania. Two teenage children who saw the atrocities of the German armies who were blinded by their loyalty to Hitler. There were a few differences: Anne Frank died in the concentration camp while Elie Wiessel survived. Anne Frank's diary, first published as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1950, was written in young girl's language while she was on a hiding while Night by Elie Wiesel tells the experience of a 15-y/o boy inside the concentration camps told later in the language of a 30-y/o man. Of course, I am not expecting Wiesel to do ala Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes, winning the Pulitzer and later be hounded by controversy that what he told in the story were exaggerated if not untrue. Reading Night was still a haunting and extremely sad experience for me just like any other holocaust novels that I've read so far. I just thought that it would have been more gripping if Wiesel put more meat in his descriptions of the locales in the same manner as what Imre Kertezs (another Holocaust survivor) did in his Fatelessness and of course, Thomas Kennealy (he is a writer only) in Schindler's List. They are just too many books on Holocaust now and these are just the 4 among the more "famous" ones but my heart still cries buckets of tears while reading them.

Critiquing a well-loved book like this is like blasphemy. I just feel like I am doing the 6 million Jews who perished in that horrendous shameless genocide an injustice if I say something about any literature depicting what they went through.

What they went through has marked a permanent etch in our collective psyche. Their stories need to be told to and read by all the future generations. I hope that this generation and all the next ones will remember the Holocaust and learn the lesson from it. Saying these things is almost like a cliche since it is just stating the obvious from a well-known fact.

This sounds like a beauty-pageant-kind-of-question but if I were given a chance to talk to one famous living person, I would choose Elie Wiesel. I will ask him what exactly he was thinking in that scene when the young boy with angel's sad face was hanged. He was looking at the boy, who because he weighted light (being a boy), did not die right away but hanged there still breathing for few hours. Somebody at the back said: "Where is God? Where is God now?" The 15-y/o Wiesel said: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows." I know that he lost faith in God, but later in the scene when there was another "selection" he cried out to God again. I would like to know how he was able to switch back his faith despite what he was experiencing in the camp. What is it that make us believers cling on to God despite being all the hopelessness and desperation that we all go through at times?

Elie Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom. 7th guy from the left

Oh, I have other questions but I hate long reviews. Primo Levi is next.(less)

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Apr 08, 2010 JG (The Introverted Reader) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: own, 5_stars, biography_memoir, holocaust-genocide, non-fiction, read_in_2010, reviewed, setting_poland, translations

Honestly, I can't help but feel that for me to sit in judgment of a memoir of the Holocaust would be terribly presumptuous. We can't ever forget what happened, and any work that reminds us of what happened is important and should be read as widely as possible. The style is a little sparse for me, but do we really need lavish descriptions of crematoriums? I didn't think so. What is important is that Wiesel laid out his thoughts and feelings for all the world to see, an act of unimaginable courage...more

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Jan 22, 2009 Anna rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: EVERY SINGLE PERSON.

Recommended to Anna by: Mrs. Recker

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 every person in my class for...more

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Jul 03, 2008 Lorena rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Lorena by: Sandra

Shelves: gringolombian-bookclub

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 re...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)

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Jan 04, 2009 Eric_W rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 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. Tw...more

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Apr 25, 2007 Anna rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Here's my caveat: although I think Night is very well written, and therefor rated it as such, I need to note that I believe that its author is one of the great current enemies of the Jewish people. Why? Because he tries to feed us profane and immoral answers (support the zionist agenda no matter what, embrace Israel as a fictive "Jewish homeland", condone a genocidal agenda toward the Palestinian people) in response to a series of sacred and enduring questions (as a Jewish people, what is our pl...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Zenmoon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir, life-writing

This book sat on the book-stand by my bed for a few weeks before I could bring myself to read it. I kept glancing over at it, picking it up, putting it down - wanting to read it, steeling myself to read it, daunted by the prospect of reading it, back and forth.

‘Night’ is a short, but disturbing memoir which details Elie Wiesel’s memories of the beginnings of Jewish deportation, from Hungary, in 1944, to the Nazi death camps of Germany. Elie writes about his subsequent incarceration, along with h...more

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Mar 10, 2009 Daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, 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 read by a Holocaust su...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)

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Apr 06, 2008 Heather rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: fiction, book-club-selections

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 comprehend how it eve...more

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Sep 04, 2007 Emanuel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 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 "Night", I thought the movie was...more

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May 29, 2007 Jennifer Randall rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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, he names the bo...more

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May 15, 2013 Tania rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: best, favorite-books

Never shall I forget those moments that mudered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

This book is a shocking and very personal account of the authors time spend in german concentracion camps. Night felt more real than any of the other holocaust memoirs I've read before, and I think this is because Elie tells you how he felt and not just what he saw.

I've never really thought about what it must have felt like to be very religious and then have all of these horrible events happen to yo...more

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Mar 18, 2013 arcobaleno rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: letteraturastraniera, storia, diario-memoriale, guerraedintorni

Un'agonia di massa, silenziosa
Non avevo intenzione di leggerlo ora, ma dopo le prime righe non ho saputo più smettere... e sono andata avanti fino alla fine, trascinata dal quindicenne Eliezer, che racconta la sua deportazione, insieme al padre, nel '45.
E' la testimonianza dello sterminio degli ebrei nei campi di concentramento. E' una delle innumerevoli storie, simili fra loro, ma ciascuna col suo peso e la sua unicità, quelle che insieme hanno costruito la Storia.
E quando si comunica col cuo...more

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Nov 21, 2012 Chana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: jewish, wwll, received-through-bookcrossing, recommended-to-me, religion

I don't know if I have the right to review this book at all as what can one say? There really are no words, just tears. Still, I have thoughts about the book and I will share them.

When Eliezer Wiesel was a 15 year old boy, a student of Talmud and Gemorah, living with his family in Sighet, Translyvania, he and his family were put into a cattle car and transported to Birkenau. When they arrived, to the sight of the smoke stacks and the smell of burning corpses, to the mind-destroying sight of livi...more

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Jan 11, 2009 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: war, good-nonfiction, favorites, darkness, read-in-2009, audio, important-message, transformative-experience

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 children...more

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Feb 12, 2008 HRH rated it 4 of 5 stars

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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About Elie Wiesel

Eliezer Wiesel is a Romania-born American novelist, political activist, and Holocaust survivor of Hungarian Jewish descent. He is the author of over 40 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "...more

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Books by Elie Wiesel

The Night Trilogy: Night/Dawn/The Accident

The Trial of God: (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)

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Quotes from Night

“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” — 375 people liked it

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” — 250 people liked it

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avg rating	preview: Night Goodreads rating: 4.25 (321074 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1617.Night?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1364599916l/1617.jpg[/img][/url] [url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1617.Night?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Night by Elie Wiesel[/url]

Night (The Night Trilogy #1)

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