Night by Elie Wiesel is a novel written by his experiences during the World War II in the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz. He was just a teenager when he experienced all the things he talks about in this novel. Elie grew up in a small community “Sighet” located in Hungarian Transylvania. Elie was a member of a Jewish family, so he studied religion. He studied Talmud, and by night he would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. He was obsessed by the idea of studying Kabbalah, but his father was against that, he thought that Elie was too young for that. He said that Maimonides used to tell them that they had to be at least thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism.
This novel is a very sad but true story about Elie’s witness to the genocide of his friends and his loved ones. During the horrifying experiences he lives in the German concentration camps located in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he sees his family, friends and all the Jewish people starve to death, degraded and being murdered. His family was separated and destroyed by the Germans. He sees things that he never imagined he would ever see. This war not only changed him physically, it changed his way of thinking and it also changed his life for complete. Elie and his family lose everything they once had; their home, all their valuable belongings and Elie even loses his hope in the God he once believed that really existed.
In this novel the author is trying to give us some important messages from what he had to go through during World War II.
Never give up. He encounters more traumas then what most of us would experience in our lifetime. But even though he went through so much, he never gives up. He keeps on going and going despite the suffering and extreme adversity he’s forced to endure.
No one can choose their own circumstances, but we can choose how to respond to them all. Elie just like all the other Jews was expelled from his home and forced to do hard work and starve in those German concentration camps. One of the messages of “Night” is that there is still an existential choice to be made, a choice in how one lives one’s life even in the midst of such hopelessness. Elie chose to live, and that means he had to do whatever it takes to survive and to keep on with his life.
A sense of community is vital. During the war Elie may have lost his faith in God, but he never completely gives up his his identity as a Jew. He know that if he abandons his ethnic and religious identity, then the Nazis will have won.
I would definitely recommend this Novel. I really think people should read it because it is a book that grips the soul of its reader and brings them back in time to experience the horrors of the Holocaust. This short memoir tells of Wiesel’s personal struggle as a Jew sent to the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. Consisting of a little more than one hundred pages, it is a short but worthwhile read. Helps us understand. A sure way to let stuff like that repeat is by forgetting about it. Unfortunately, we have forgotten about it, since it still happens in the world. Maybe it’s not very known, but things like the ones I read in this book still happen in our planet and I really think it’s not fair.
I could read this book over and over and I think I’m never going to get over it. It made me look at things a different way I used to, and I also learned a lot with this book. I didn’t really know why World War II had begun, and now thanks to this book I understood what really happened to people in that war. I also learned what Hitler really wanted and that he hated Jews. He wanted to exterminate all of them as soon as possible.
With this book I learned that whatever happens to me in life, no matter how hard it seems to be, I never have to give up. Because life is about that, life is a struggle we all live in, but life is also amazing. If everything is perfect I guess it would be boring. I loved this book and I’m really glad I got to read it myself, now I’m going to make other people read it too.
