Night
by Elie Wiesel
reviewed by Tessa de Oca, class of 2015

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, gives a shocking and horrific personal insight into the Nazi concentration camps in his autobiography Night. The literary work starts with the young Jewish teenager Eliezer living with his mother, father, and sister in Sighet in Hungarian Transylvania in 1944. In the beginning of the novel, Elie discusses the eeriness of the Jews being oblivious of the intensity and actuality of their soon-coming danger. His family is moved to a ghetto along with most of his community and then eventually relocated to the horrifying concentration camps. Here, his mother and sister are immediately exterminated by being thrown into the fire because they cannot be “useful” or do any work. Elie and his father then remain together throughout the length of the autobiography, enduring together the starvation, beatings, sickness, cruelty, pain, arduous labor, and deprivation. With a shockingly blunt, and raw view, readers experience all these horrific events with them. In the work, Elie demonstrates the themes of faith and religion, power and the consequences, and inhumanity. Before the Holocaust Elie possesses an absolute and strong faith in God, but in the concentration camps he struggles to maintain any faith at all. In addition, the autobiography takes an extremely personal tone as the author examines the cruel consequences of the Nazis’ power on individual Jews and himself. The evils that can come about when power falls in the wrong hands is demonstrated though the horrific events of the Holocaust as a whole and also as mentioned in the book. Night also consists of continual inhumane acts towards the Jews and examines the negativities this cruelty brings about. I found this autobiography to be shocking, grasping, and devastating, but an absolute must-read. I have always learned about the Holocaust and concentration camps, but I have never read something so personal and shocking about the Holocaust as this. I recommend this book to someone looking for a piece of literature that is moving, inspirational, eye-opening and at the same time cruel and horrific.