REVIEW

    The book Night, by Elie Wiesel, is a brief autobiography of his life during the Holocaust after the Nazis overran his town of Sighet, Transylvania in Romania in the year 1944.  In the spring of 1944 when Elie was 15, the Nazis captured Romania.  Soon after a series of increasingly harsh and restricting laws are passed.  The Jews of Sighet are then forced into small ghettos within the town.  Soon after being  pushed into the ghetto, they are herded onto cattle cars. The journey is long with many people packed into the cars and little food.  After many days and nights crammed in the car, exhausted and thin from famine, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz.  On Eliezer's arrival in Birkenau, he and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, whom they never see again. In the first of many selections (where the Nazis choose a certain number of people to die) that Eliezer describes in the story, the Jews are evaluated to determine whether they should be killed immediately or put to work. Eliezer and his father seem to pass the evaluation, but before they are brought to the prisoners' barracks, they stumble upon the open-pit furnaces where the Nazis are burning babies by the truckload.
    The Jewish arrivals are stripped, shaved, disinfected, and treated with great cruelty and hatred. Eventually, their captors march them from Birkenau to the main camp, Auschwitz. They eventually arrive in Buna, a work camp where Eliezer is put to work in an electrical-fittings factory. Under slave-labor conditions, severely starved and decimated by the frequent selections, the Jews lose hope in everything except each other, their religion, and their hope for a state of Israel. In the camp, they are subject to unimaginable cruelty, including beatings and repeated humiliations. A vicious foreman forces Eliezer to give him his gold tooth, which is pried out of his mouth with a rusty spoon.
    The prisoners are forced to watch the hanging of fellow prisoners in the camp courtyard. On one occasion, the Gestapo even hang a small child who had been associated with some rebels within Buna. Because of the horrific conditions of the camps, and the ever-present danger of death, many of the prisoners themselves begin to slide into cruelty, concerned only with personal survival. Sons begin to abandon and abuse their fathers. One incident on a train, a boy beats his father to death so that he can have an entire loaf of bread instead of splitting it with his father.  Eliezer himself begins to lose his humanity and his faith, both in G-d and the people around him.
    After months in the camp, Eliezer undergoes an operation for a foot injury. While he is in the infirmary or the sick area, however, the Nazis decide to evacuate the camp because the Russians are advancing and are on the verge of liberating Buna. In the middle of a snowstorm, the prisoners begin a death march, forced to run for more than fifty miles to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. Many die of exposure and exhaustion. At Gleiwitz, the prisoners are herded into cattle cars once again. They begin another deadly journey: 100 Jews board the car, but only twelve remain alive by trip's end at the concentration camp Buchenwald. Throughout the ordeal, Eliezer and his father have helped each other survive through mutual support and concern, but in Buchenwald, Eliezer's father dies of dysentery and physical abuse. Eliezer survives, an empty shell of a man until April 11th, 1945, when the American army liberates the camp.
    Although the book was gloomy and depressing I highly recommend it.  It gives a horrific account of one man's life through one of the darkest periods in human history.  The book leaves the reader with in a depressed mood but tells a story of utmost importance.  The terrible accounts in Night make it a book that everyone needs to read to make sure history does not repeat itself.
 
 

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