Written by Elie Wiesel
“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.”
A line from the Sunday Review says of this book: “Wiesel has taken his own anguish and imaginatively metamorphosed it into art.” Frankly, that’s putting it lightly.
It’s a slim 115 pages, but in that brevity lies a power, depth and terror that is almost impossible to imagine, impossible to conceive, and too terrible to contemplate…except that it MUST be contemplated.
I saw Night in the bookstore as I left the remains of Birkenau in July. I was tempted to buy it then…but after a full day in the remains of the most agonizing cemetery on planet Earth, I wasn’t in any condition to continue the experience. I needed some time and distance, and when I returned to Canada, I picked it up…
…and over the course of two hours, I ravenously consumed this aching, evocative memoir. An experience unparalleled in its evil and barbarity, reduced to a poetic, simple narrative of memory and anguish. It left me with nightmares for days afterwards, but they are nightmares that need to be suffered. It’s least some of us can do for those who experienced the horror of the Nazi death camps. When there is no other comfort to offer, only empathy can suffice.
A personal account of Auschwitz that is piercing in its bluntness, its straightforwardness…and yet it is also a template for the mind-numbing scope of the Holocaust. A small boy’s exhausting, humiliating attempt to survive, now an archetype for history’s most depraved chapter. Everyone on Earth should be required to read this book…if, for no other reason, than to truly understand — even for a brief moment — what true barbarity entails.
Read it…just read it. The only other words required are what Elie Wiesel himself has written…and remembered.
