Night by Elie Wiesel

Night. by Elie Wiesel. Hill and Wang, 2006. 120 pages.

Review/Personal thoughts:  This is the story, the true story, of Wiesel’s account of his internment in German concentration camps during World War II when he was a teenager.   It is a graphic account of the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man.  This is not a horror story to entertain, but so that, as the author himself states, the world will never forget. Wiesel, his parents and his two sisters are loaded onto boxcars and taken to an undisclosed destination. The description of the train conditions were only a hint of the incomprehensible horrors that  would come. “The heat, the thirst, the stench, the lack of air, were all suffocating us.” They arrived at their destination, Birkenau, which no one had ever heard of.  Immediately men and boys were separated from women and girls. Wiesel writes, “I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.” The accounts of violence, humiliation, starvation and death is recounted in Wiesel’s powerful words.  Throughout the ordeal, Wiesel is with his father who becomes weaker and closer to death. Here is a teenager watching helplessly as his father literally is dying.  One of the prisoners gave Wiesel some advice, “In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone.”  This was the brutal reality of survival. This firsthand account will give older tweens a glimpse into the holocaust. It is a book that one will not forget and that is the author’s purpose.  Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Genre: Non-Fiction, Autobiography

Reading Level: 4.8 Interest level: Ages 12 and up.