Matthew Ted's Reviews > Night

139th book of 2020.

This book stings like the cold. In fact, the cover of my edition is what it feels like; I can feel that ice in the pit of my stomach after reading some of the descriptions here... Descriptions that Wiesel writes almost flippantly. I will be quoting some, and they are not pleasant to read: you are warned.

Wiesel was just a boy when he was sent to Auschwitz. It's hard to imagine that his entire experience is captured in 115 pages. It wasn't always that way - his first manuscript was 900 pages long; that has been distilled to this. The writing is hard to describe: sparse? Deft? Minimalist? Wiesel put it quite well when Orson Welles expressed interest in turning it into a movie: Wiesel believed that a movie would fail because it would be made without the silences between his words. Most of the book he is with his father. When the camp is liberated in 1945, Wiesel is 16 years old.

Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes...children thrown into the flames. (Is it a wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)

He said about his book, "In Night, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night." In just 115 pages he manages to begin with his life before, briefly, the creation of the ghettos, the arriving at Auschwitz, his time there, his own feelings and there is quite the discussion into the "death of God" through his eyes, as he suggests in the above quote. Though for a time Wiesel toys with the idea of God and providence.

I had new shoes myself. But as they were covered with a thick coat of mud, they had not been noticed. I thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wondrous universe.

The language is deceptively simple. There is a certain silence to it, as he comments on too. He uses many ellipses throughout the book, which I don't tend to like in books, but they work here. The reason the language is so empty at times is what makes it echo so hauntingly.

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

Elie Wiesel received a Nobel Peace Prize in his life. He died in 2016. Utah senator Orrin Hatch said this, "With Elie's passing, we have lost a beacon of humanity and hope. We have lost a hero of human rights and a luminary of Holocaust literature." A luminary is a beautiful choice of words. We can hope with literature like Wiesel's and Primo Levi's, we can continue to learn about the Holocaust to ensure that it never happens again. However, in 2018, two years after Wiesel's death, antisemitic graffiti was found on the house he was born in. So, we ask ourselves, what have we truly learnt since 1945?