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Rating: 
Summary: The Fire! The Furnace! Look, over there!
Review: The cries of a madwoman on an Auschwitz-bound cattle car are just one of many portents shepherding doomed souls on their way to Nazi furnaces. In "Night", the first of three books in this collection, Elie Wiesel recounts his deportation to the death camps where the rest of his family perished. The tragic weight of his witness to this obscene cruelty burdens the reader with the fates of the inmates and his reflections on the meaning of evil. Wiesel questions his god and his faith. He sees sons kill fathers: "Meir. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father... you're hurting me... you're killing your father! I've got some bread... for you too... for you too..." (p.106), and becomes intimate with death. In "Dawn", Wiesel has migrated to Palestine and faces the duty to execute a captured prisoner. His long night of contemplation and uncertainty exposes his preoccupation with killing and killers and again with death: "Death," Kalman, the grizzled master, told me, "is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes. If ever you meet a creature with eyes everywhere, you can be sure that it is death." (p.140). It is a preoccupation to be squeezed only from one who has not fully lost his faith or his humanity. A beggar explains the face of the night: "Listen," he said, digging his fingers into my arm. "I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." (p.126) Fear, night, suffering, and evil are his companions, and he explores them constantly. "Being afraid is nothing. Fear is only a color, a backdrop, a landscape." (p.174). Until, in "Day", he survives a terrible accident and is faced with his own complacent acceptance of mortality. He struggles with the urge to explain to his talented young doctor the futility of fighting against death, and reaches an epiphany when he understands the tragedy of splashing others with his suffering. "Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul - and worse, the souls of your friends - for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep." (p.247). These stories are powerful and frightening,. Death is an implacable enemy, but also a partner for life who never goes away and will always win in the end. Wiesel has stared at evil, his stories are wrenching.
Rating:
Summary: The Fire! The Furnace! Look, over there!
Review: The cries of a madwoman on an Auschwitz-bound cattle car are just one of many portents shepherding doomed souls on their way to Nazi furnaces. In "Night", the first of three books in this collection, Elie Wiesel recounts his deportation to the death camps where the rest of his family perished. The tragic weight of his witness to this obscene cruelty burdens the reader with the fates of the inmates and his reflections on the meaning of evil. Wiesel questions his god and his faith. He sees sons kill fathers: "Meir. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father... you're hurting me... you're killing your father! I've got some bread... for you too... for you too..." (p.106), and becomes intimate with death. In "Dawn", Wiesel has migrated to Palestine and faces the duty to execute a captured prisoner. His long night of contemplation and uncertainty exposes his preoccupation with killing and killers and again with death: "Death," Kalman, the grizzled master, told me, "is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes. If ever you meet a creature with eyes everywhere, you can be sure that it is death." (p.140). It is a preoccupation to be squeezed only from one who has not fully lost his faith or his humanity. A beggar explains the face of the night: "Listen," he said, digging his fingers into my arm. "I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." (p.126) Fear, night, suffering, and evil are his companions, and he explores them constantly. "Being afraid is nothing. Fear is only a color, a backdrop, a landscape." (p.174). Until, in "Day", he survives a terrible accident and is faced with his own complacent acceptance of mortality. He struggles with the urge to explain to his talented young doctor the futility of fighting against death, and reaches an epiphany when he understands the tragedy of splashing others with his suffering. "Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul - and worse, the souls of your friends - for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep." (p.247). These stories are powerful and frightening,. Death is an implacable enemy, but also a partner for life who never goes away and will always win in the end. Wiesel has stared at evil, his stories are wrenching.
Rating:
Summary: The most emotional account of the Holocaust
Review: This book should simply be read by everyone interested in Judiasm or the Holocaust. Just read it!
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