Night Oprah’s Book Club (Cheap Book
April 20th, 2009 | 
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Customer Cheap College Textbook Reviews
Makes Me Never Want to Complain About Anything Again
Last week I was feeling a bit down, so I decided to read something that would allow me to stop being so hard on myself. I picked up this Night by because it’s an excellent example of what happens to the human psyche under the most unbearable circumstances.
First, Elie Wiesel tells how the Jews in his Transylvanian village were in denial of Hilter ever being able to invade their country. Despite all of the horror stories that they read in the paper or heard on the radio, they simply believed because of their location, Hilter would be defeated by the Allies before he could ever reach them. Later when the Gestapo invaded their town, they were not alarmed because the Germans were friendly…at first. Then of course came the Jewish ghettos, curfews, and deportation to concentration camps.
I’m not going to go too much more into the book because you really need to read it for yourself. I will say however that after having read it in a few hours, it immensely changed they way I view my life. Some of the descriptions of what it’s like to watch your parents get murdered before your own eyes and feel NO emotion, killing another person for a scrap of bread, or marching for sixteen hours in the snow with no shoes, really shook me up.
Since reading the Elie book, I realize that I actually have nothing to complain about because my life could be worse. I could be stuck in Auschwitz.
Powerful night book is an understatement,
I recall when I first read night wiesel book, it was just after Elie Wiesel had given a lecture at my university. It was in the mid-1980s, and the lecture hall was standing-room-only. Wiesel’s presentation moved us to tears, and moved us to anger, and moved me to want to follow up on his words by reading what he had written.
This cheap book is supposed to be fiction, but in a style that seems to be typical of many modern Israeli novelists, it is so close to the truth of the actual events that transpired in Wiesel’s life that it might as well be treated as autobiographical. This is actually part of a trilogy - Night, Dawn, and The Accident - although each element stands alone with integrity.
How does one deal with survival after such atrocities as that at Birkenau and Auschwitz? How can one have faith in the world? How can one accept that a people so closely identified with a powerful God can ever accept that God again? Where is God in the midst of such things?
Wiesel himself as spent his life in search of such answers, but doesn’t provide them here. Why then would one want to read such accounts as these? Wiesel was silent for many years, until he was brought into speech and writing as a witness to the events. Wiesel proclaims that there is in the world now a new commandment - ‘Thou shalt not stand idly by’ - when such things are happening, one must act. One must remember the past in all its personal aspects to both honour those who suffered and to forestall such things happening again (which, given the the depressing repetitive nature of history, is a difficult task).
This is the Night Elie Wiesel book I’ve ever read. It is one that has stayed with me from the first page, and I’ve never been able to shake the images brought forward, the misery and suffering, the existence of evil and brutality, the sadness and desolation. We live in a culture that likes to gloss over pain and suffering, mask it with drugs and other things, and always end the story with a happy ending.
There is no happy ending here - even Wiesel’s own survival is a questionable good here. How does one live after this? How does the world go on?
One thing is certain, we must never forget, and this book is part of that active remembering that we are called to do.
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