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Customer Rating:
Summary: Bearing Witness
Comment: Whether you are approaching this memoir as a student or as a lay reader, it's message of hope
against all odds and every depravity makes it a testament of the human spirit worth reading. Wisely
choosing a spare style, Elie Wiesel lets the horrors of the Holocaust speak for themselves.
Nevertheless, he brings a poetic ear to the proceedings with some arresting moments, such as the
"Never will I forget..." refrain that comes with his first night at Auschwitz. His curse is our
blessing, and although we shall never forget the experience, either, it is for a different reason.
This riveting account of one Jewish boy's trip (with his father) through five concentration camps in
a year toward the end of the war speaks to us through the screams, the fire and smoke, indeed the
ages, making it a modern classic of the memoir genre.

In addition to the
concentration camps, the terrain of the human mind is part of Wiesel's subject. He explores how he
and his fellow Jews dismissed warning after warning -- refusing to believe the storm clouds on the
horizon in his idyllic Hungarian youth -- until Hungarian Jews were put first into ghettos and then
into cattle car transports and it was too late.

In the camps we face one physical
crisis after another as we meet players high and low, noble and depraved, in a system of killing
that quite simply worked and worked efficiently. Wiesel's Jewish faith is put to the test, and the
author explores such deep topics as the far-reaching effects of dehumanization and loyalty to family
under duress. Readers turn pages horrified but spellbound -- for what Wiesel's contemporaries
refused to believe could happen in the 20th century, probably we are equally sure could never happen
in our own 21st. If that's the case, we haven't learned Wiesel's lessons. The seed of evil is
there. Darfur is reality. And genocide is always a threat in an age rife with religious and
sectarian hatreds as well as more and more expedient ways to dispose of human life. It is for us to
stand guard, to make sure that history of this sort does not repeat itself while we stand by
silently.

Wiesel's long, metaphorical night will prove enlightening, then. Perversely
so, perhaps, but so nonetheless. Read it both as a cautionary tale and as a testament to hope and
survival. But please, read it!

Customer Rating:
Summary: truly a breath taking book
Comment: this book was amazing. It has been a long time since I have read a book and not been able to put it
down. It shows the effects of the Holocost in the most amazing perspective I have ever read. I am in
the middle of the sequal and it too, is fantastic.

Customer Rating:
Summary: truly a breath taking book
Comment: this book was amazing. It has been a long time since I have read a book and not been able to put it
down. It shows the effects of the Holocost in the most amazing perspective I have ever read. I am in
the middle of the sequal and it too, is fantastic.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Night
Comment: I can definitely understand why Oprah chose this book. It is a must-read. It is one of those books
you dare not put down until finished. I contemplated reading it again soon after going through it
the first time. Unbelievable cruelty ... another eyewitness account of the atrocities of the
holocaust! Use tissues as a bookmark!

Customer Rating:
Summary: A Very Important Book
Comment: This book is very intense and heart wrenching. An important read for anyone. It should be considered
a "must" for young folks who may see Hitler's abosolute evil as a distant past but this man's
experience brings the the enormity of it into our hearts.