Review of Night by Elie Wiesel

*Night* by Elie Wiesel (2006 edition). Published by Hill & Wang.

Night is one of those books one always ends up hearing about (maybe it’s because I grew up inside of the American high school English curriculum). Despite my proximity to Washington D.C., I never had to go to the Holocaust Museum for a school field trip, although my sister landed that one, and I ended up going to a magnet school that didn’t read Night—unlike the school I was actually zoned for.

So years later, once I’m out of college and in graduate school, I was looking for an audiobook to listen to while I was doing work. I ended up landing an internship with Smithsonian Enterprises to intern at Smithsonian Books, and I can’t just do my work when it comes to WFH in silence.

So I went on Libby, poked my way through the books, and decided it was time to finally listen to Night instead of reading. It was only a four-ish hour audiobook so I knew I could handle that in this one day, and since I listen to everything on 1.75 times speed, I ended up clearing through this audiobook quickly.

It helps that I’ve been going through a phase where I listen to a lot of nonfiction on World War I and World War II, so I’m used to absorbing a lot of information and narratives about these on 1.75 times speed at this point. Anyways, I’m really glad I finally got around to listening to Night!

Here’s my review.

Elie Wiesel recalls his experiences in the concentration camps in the middle of World War II.

Night is told in chronological order, so it’s good to know that the beginning of the memoir takes place in what is now current day Romania, and where Wiesel grew up there were a lot of Jews.

There’s a big amount of history to dig into the region and how it ended involved in World War II, but that’s information one should just Google. We’d lose focus on this post otherwise.

Wiesel is a teenager when the war begins and the narrative starts in 1941. He already is showing signs in critical thinking and spirituality with his discussions with other people, much to the chagrin of his father.

In June that year, the Hungarian government passes new laws against Jews. Wiesel’s talking buddy is affected by it, as any Jew who can’t prove their citizenship has to be deported. Forced onto a cattle train to Poland, the man, Moshe, escapes and finds his way back to the village, telling all the Jews living there about what’s to happen to them.

On the train, he witnessed how the Nazis treated them like slave labor, then shot the people who had literally just dug their own graves. No one in the town listened to him. This is the first of many in Night who sound the alarm and are ignored.

Years pass. It is 1944 and the Germans have come to the town. They arrest the local community leaders, have the Jews sent to the ghettos, but the Wiesel family lives inside of one so they aren’t forced to give up everything they own yet.

Not too long later, Wiesel and his family are packed into a cattle car, where this is the next sign. They are not given water or food for their journey, and the people live in the dark despairing about what’s to come. One of their neighbors keeps looking out the window and screaming that she sees fire, and everyone believes her at first.

When they realize she’s delirious, they beat her, but she still continues to scream out that there is a fire. Eventually, they stop beating her and leave her to her own devices.

Their destination is Auschwitz. Elie and his father are sent into one line, and his mother and sisters into another. As it turns out, it would be the last time he would see his mother and youngest sister, as they were sent immediately to the gas chambers. His other sisters survived the war and reunited with him when they were all in a different country.

As many now know, the conditions Elie and his father would face in the coming months were terrible. He sees how his father slowly begins to fall apart from the situation, and Elie must become the one to protect them both.

There’s a section in the memoir about this, as well as how Elie begins to lose faith in a God out there. They are then moved to another camp, where one of the bigger events is an American bombing. They all cheered when it happened.

Now facing starvation, Elie barely recognizes his father, then they are sent on a death march when the Soviets start closing in. In the snow, men fall quickly, and are shot if they don’t get up quickly enough.

One of the leaders from their town finally gives up and prepares to die, while a rabbi is abandoned by his son, who thinks he has died and looks for him among the corpses.

Elie’s father barely makes it through the march, but when they arrive at their next destination, he is so weak he cannot get up. He has dysentery and the men in his bunk have attacked him. It’s clear he’s not going to make it. One night while begging for water, his father is beaten by a Nazi, and suddenly calls out his name.

Elie wakes up and realizes his father is dead and his last words were his name. Freedom came not long after that, but what this incident (and the one with the rabbi) shows that in the face of great suffering and tragedy, we lose even the familial bonds temporarily to survive.

Overall Thoughts

Such an important part of history is in this book, and in an age where anti-semitism and the rhetoric that led to the Nazi Party is ripe, it becomes even more important than ever to read these kinds of books.

My mother wants to go to the Holocaust Museum and I’ve now decided to take her at the end of the summer—I am writing this in July 2023—to try and learn more. It’s a haunting, harrowing memoir that is necessary in classrooms, that’s for sure.

I listened to the audiobook so I’m not too sure of how the words unfolded on the page, but it felt smooth to listen to overall.

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