Night (book)

Night is a 1960 book by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. In 1954 he completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign. In 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night. Translated into 30 languages, the book ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature.

About Night (book) in brief

Night is a 1960 book by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity. In 1954 he completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign. The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. In 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night. Translated into 30 languages, the book ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. Night is the first in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, Day—marking Wiesel’s transition during and after the Holocaust from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania, to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, and his wife, Sarah, née Feig. The family lived in a community of 10,000–20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Between 15 May and 8 July 1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews are recorded as having been sent there on 147 trains, most on arrival.

As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe, the mass deportations began at a rate of four trains a day from Hungary to Auschwitz, each train carrying around 3,000 people. Between May and June 1944, 131,641 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania to Auschwitz. On arrival at Auschwitz, they were selected for the death or labour; to be sent to the left, to the gas chamber, or to the right, meant for the work. On January 31, 1945, Chlomos Wiesel and his sisters Hilda and Beatrice were forced to stay together, surviving forced labour and a death march. Weimar died in January 1945, and weimar was liberated in April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above for fear of being beaten too. In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed, a kapo tells him. “I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night. Yet we begin back with night,” he said. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from YiddISH to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art. Wiesel called it his deposition, The book is a testimony to the end of the Holocaust.

Related posts:

Auschwitz concentration camp The Holocaust Siegfried Lederer’s escape from Auschwitz The Holocaust in Slovakia