Night

During my flight home on Sunday I read the most moving book, Night by Elie Wiesel.

I picked up the book as a friend (Lori C.) and I were walking through Target in WA. She stated that she read it in three hours and loved it. So I decided to pick it up for the flight home. Little did I know just how gut-wrenching this book would be.

Once I picked it up I couldn’t put it down. I felt as though Elie Wiesel was sitting in front of me giving his account of these events. I cringed when Moshe the Beadle gave his account of the being transported out of the city for not having proper identification.

Moshe goes from one Jewish household to the next telling his story. "Jews, listen to me. It's all I ask of you. I don't want money or pity. Only listen to me" (17). The cattle train crossed the border into Poland, he tells them, where it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were singled out, transferred to lorries, and driven to the forest in Galicia, near Kolomaye, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole, present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. Moshe tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen.

I cried when I read of the torment that he felt over his father. He loved and respected his father so much, yet faced with the basic needs of his own survival he couldn’t help but feel his father was a burden, dragging him down and threatening his ability to survive another day.

An alert sounds, the camp lights goes out, and Wiesel, exhausted, follows the crowd to the barracks, leaving his father behind. He wakes at dawn on a wooden bunk, remembering that he has a father, and goes in search of him.
But at that same moment this thought came into my mind. Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever. (101)

How did these people find the strength and will to go on after days of pain, filth, despair, humiliation and degradation? Could I have that kind of will-power in the face of such evil or would I pray for the peace death would bring me? Would I be a devoted child or would I submit to my own human needs and resent those who were weaker and depended upon me?

In the morning, January 29, 1945, Eliezer finds another invalid lying in his father's place. The Kapos had come before dawn and taken him to the crematorium, possibly still alive.
His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond.
I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like — free at last! (106)


I hope to never be faced with nightmare that was 1941-1945.

I encourage everyone to read this book and in turn encourage many more to read it. It teaches a lesson that we all must never forget, but must always remember.