Bea’s Books

Two weeks ago, my English teacher assigned the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, telling us little more than that it was a story about the author’s experiences in a concentration camp during World War II. In a little over a week, I had finished the book, mortified.

I was not oblivious to the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust, but I had never had them presented in such a blunt manner, making the novel all the more chilling.

Elie’s story begins in Sighet, Romania, where he devoted himself to the study of his faith, Judaism. The war brought separation to Sighet, the Nazis pushing Jewish people into ghettos before deporting them to concentration camps. Unaware of what was to come, Elie and his family were deported, his sister and mother killed in the gas chambers but himself and his father managing to remain together through the traumatic events that shape the book.

A focal point of this book is the way Elie writes about religion, and how his perspective changes throughout just a few years. He describes himself as incredulous that God could allow such things to happen and confused as to why faith still existed among such battered believers, many of whom had turned against one another as a last resort. The pain of realizing such a violent severance of faith is felt throughout, and remains constant through the turbulencies of Elie’s story.

Overall, Elie sets forth a clear and direct narrative of his experiences that is difficult to read, yet hard to put down as he recounts the nauseating events and conditions of the concentration camps. To me, the clarity was the most terrifying part. The clarity in the fact that humans could treat each other with such hate is the crux of this novel. And the parallels: the deportation of law-abiding people, the mistreatment of said people, and the sowing of hate to promote division that only benefits the powerful, these themes do not preside solely in “Night”, they crop up in the margins and on the front covers of history, the pages of which no one is exempt.