5 stars for Night (Night Trilogy book 1) by Elie Wiesel.
I have always thought Night is a non fiction, a wartime memoir written by Elie Wiesel, that is until I search the genre for this book as confirmation for purpose of labelling my review. Some sites list it as a novel while Wikipedia says "it remains unclear how much of Night is memoir". It seems strange to me that there can be much controversy as to whether Night is fiction or non fiction. After all, the author himself said in interviews that the book is factual and is never portrayed as a novel. Yet some scholars who studied holocaust memoirs have raised questions about how much of the book can be verified.
Well, in any case, both Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com have made changes to certify Night as non fiction (way back in 2006). The former has removed the book from its fiction list, while the latter has changed the categorization of the new edition of Night and revised the editorial description of a previous text edition to make clear that it considers the book a memoir, not a novel.
For me, having read Night, I regard it as a memoir, one with a trauma narrative that is true in its call to readers to remember the Holocaust and the millions of Jews who died, to learn from those who survived, and most importantly, never to allow such an event to happen again.
Elie Wiesel wrote the book because he believed it is "his duty to bear witness for the dead and for the living". And true enough, Night preserves the lives of the dead as a constant reminder to the living of what was suffered and lost and could go through again if the memories are not etched in ink and the past is allowed to be forgotten. Taken verbatim from the preface to the new translation, this is what Elie Wiesel wrote "For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."
In the opening of the very same preface, Elie Wiesel says it all, that Night is the foundation of all his literary works, without which the rest cannot be fully apprehended. To quote "If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works."
Indeed, Night is Wiesel's masterpiece, a sad, shocking and horrific account of his personal experiences with his father as prisoners in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1944-1945, towards the end of the Second World War in Europe. Though haunting and appalling in its directness, humanity shines from every page of his book as Wiesel bears witness to the Jews taking solace in caring for one another in the face of atrocities in the Nazi German concentration camps. He was 15 years old then.
Ultimately, Night is a story about death and survival. To quote "Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. 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." As prisoners of war, the Jews are subjected to horrific living conditions and the constant threat of death. To survive, they can only do what is best for themselves. Many eventually only concerned themselves with personal survival. Even so, many do not live through the concentration camps, the "selections" and the death marches. Though Wiesel withstood it all and lived to see liberation from Nazi occupation, he carried with him a corpse of memories that haunt him for the rest of his life. To quote "...I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me."
Night is such a harrowing and engrossing read that before I know it, I have reached the end of the book. Truly, it is a book of great historical importance, albeit one with terrifying power. Night has since been translated into thirty languages and sold millions of copies since its first publication. I am glad to have joined the millions who have read this memoir.
Publisher: Hill and Wang; Second Edition, Revised
Publication date: 10 Sep 2013
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Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.
*Blurb from Goodreads*
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