Customer Rating: 
Summary: Lest We Forget
Comment: I have long been obssessed with WWII and its tragedies - not out of morbid fascination, but out of
worried anticipation of history repeating itself. Comments about the holocaust never occuring send
chills down my spine. Elie Wiesel's "Night" is one powerful reminder of the flaws in human nature
and character.
Wonderfully written, with simple prose and direct explanation, "Night"
is an account of a survivor of Auschwitz, the infamous factory of death. Powerful in every way - in
emotions, thoughts, memories - "Night" takes the reader to the hellish barracks of the once quaint
Polish town and its air suffused with the acrid smell of burning bodies.
Elie Wiesel,
himself a holocaust survivor, speaks so clearly that a reader has no choice but to be transported to
that time of humans lacking a conscience, with all its horrors and deficiencies. There aren't many
books that can achieve this, but "Night" delivers its message and warns the reader of the frailty of
human life.
Customer Rating: Summary: The road to Auschwitz
Comment: Night is a book of great importance, for within the small volume (120 pages) packs a holocaust
story from the first person perspective of the author that describes an entire world like nothing
anyone outside of a holocaust survivor's experience could ever imagine. What makes Elie's writing
so special is the fact that he truly is a great writer, for this book does so much more than give us
the familiar images of trains, concentration camps and crematoriums. It goes beyond the abandoned
streets of his little hometown all those years ago to pour out a philosophical viewpoint that burns
through question after question. Elie does more than just question why the darkness of man can be
ever so present during the early 40s of his teenage years, but also shows the questions that brought
so much more pain within his spiritual world. When Elie realized that the closest thing to saving
him and his father from the clutches of Auschwitz were rumors of the advancing success of the
Russian Army, he and his fellow Jewish prisoners begin to wonder where the very light of God's
gentle hand has gone during this, their darkest moment of history.
Night is moving,
incredible, sad and informative all at once. It takes you from another time and place, during his
childhood, of a simple time and a happy childhood in a town far, far away in Transylvania. The
description of the people's opinions of what was going on during the war and that they thought they
were just close enough to the edge of the Earth to remain unnoticed lead into a systematic pattern
of progressive travel that strips the people of their belongings, then homes, and eventually their
very lives.
The reader will be introduced to a cast of people that all add to the power
of this story, like the little boy who escaped an incident in the woods, and tried to warn the
people of his town, or the woman on the train who kept talking about seeing a fire, even though the
lone window bore nothing but darkness (at the time...) as the train rumbled through the night. The
gritty detail of this story, of Elie's story...of THEIR story, is hard to bear. This journey of
famine and death, of camps that lie under the ever whisping ashes of loved ones burned nearby, and
of being uprooted yet again by their captors because of advancing forces to battle further
starvation and cold and disease and brutality, is something that stops and makes you think,
question, and weep as well.
Elie's story also shows a couple things that are not always
portrayed within the various films that portray the holocaust, and that is the strength and will to
live that the victims of this atrocity show throughout their ordeal. Another is the flipside, where
children and parents were not always in a world within of care and camaraderie, but a dog eat dog
survival, where every found bread crumb and every extra minute of breathing amidst the corpses of
the fallen leads beyond any barrier or threshold one could envision in terms of pain, forgiveness
and anguish. Elie also adds flashback paragraphs here and there, of seeing things later in life
that take him back to those days, as well as people he knew from then that he meets later on in
life.
The last couple of pages are noteworthy to say the least, which contain his
acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1986.
-Leo Navarr-
