Elie Wiesel is atrue voice of truth and conscience
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Night by Elie Wiesel is not only one of the definitve works on Holocaust literature, it is one of the most definitve works on humanity.
This is a factual record of Wiesel's experiences from 1941, when the author was 12 years old, dedicated to learning Talmud and thirsting to learn Kaballah, to his experiences after Jews were forced into ghettoes and then transported to the death camps.
Written in Yiddish in 1958 and translated into English in 1960.
It is a record of Wiesel's childhood in the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. It is dedicated to the memory of Wiesel's parents and his little sister Tzipora who were cruelly murdered in the Nazi inferno.
The book is stark in it's record of everything seen by the author and asks many questions for which answers are difficult to find.
It tells of the vow of Wiesel and a friend in the camp to emigrate to the Land of Israel if they survived, a dream shared by millions who died in and lived through the Shoah.
Perhaps the most horrifying and moving account in the book is when the author reveals how during the first night in Auschwitz, he and his father wait in line to be thrown into a firepit. He watches a lorry draw up beside the pit and deliver its load of children into the fire. While his father recites the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
" Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never".
Elie Wiesel has been a voice of conscience in the world ever since this book became known.
He has penned various other bestsellers. His Elie Wiesel Foundation For Human Rights has done valuable work in this field for many years.
In a plea for the plight of his own people today, especially the youth and children of Israel today targeted by terror and forces of genocide (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ahmadinejad regime- as well as all who are sympathetic to these anti-Jewish elements) he penned an open letter to President Bush stating: "Please remember that the maps on Arafat's uniform and in Palestinian children's textbooks show a Palestine encompassing not only all of the West Bank but all of Israel, while Palestinian leaders loudly proclaim that 'Palestine extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, from Rosh Hanikra (in the North) to Rafah (in Gaza). Please remember Danielle Shefi, a little girl in Israel. Danielle was five. When the murderers came, she hid under her bed. Palestinian gunmen found and killed her anyway. Think of all the other victims of terror in the Holy Land. With rare exceptions, the targets were young people, children and families. Please remember that Israel--having lost too many sons and daughters, mothers and fathers--desperately wants peace. It has learned to trust its enemies' threats more than the empty promises of 'neutral' governments".
Elie Wiesel is atrue voice of truth and conscience.
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We must never forget.
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`Night' is a poignant, evocative story of a young Elie Wiesel and his father and their experiences in a number of concentration camps during WWII. The translation from French is done beautifully, as it is written in a plain, straightforward manner, and it reads with an eloquence and softness that belies the subject matter. As you read `Night', you find yourself cringing, eyes wide with horror, and it gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach to know that innocent human beings were subjected to physical and emotional pain beyond belief. It is not graphic in the sense that there is too much information, it tells, in its simplicity, the truth of what one person experienced at one time, on this earth. Sixty years later, we believe what history has shown us of these atrocities, yet do we understand? In `Night', Elie Wiesel attempts to make us understand. He talks about Death with a capital "D" and "The Selection" of people for slaughter. His sadness and despair during his incarceration, as well as his alarming indifference to certain things in the name of survival, permeate each page. Finally, we realize that this book is written as a tribute to his father and his father's beliefs that "Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" and keep the memory alive, "Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices". So Elie Wiesel will not stay silent, and we must never forget.
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Elie Wiesel's vividly haunting memoir still reminds us. . .
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In a world that often feels like it is teetering toward relenting madness, Elie Wiesel's vividly haunting memoir still reminds us that there was a precedent for the deranged mindset that justifies acts of terrorism. In a concise, unadorned manner, he relives the spiraling insanity that surrounded the Jewish population of Sighet, Transylvania, as insulated a world as one could imagine and certainly a community who understandably could not embrace the insanity of the extermination occurring around them. Inevitably, they are taken to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, two of the most infamous concentration camps, where Wiesel provides painfully palpable detail of the day-to-day living conditions. He not only records the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi guards toward the Jews, as other have, but more tellingly, describes the inhumanity of the camp inmates toward each other for the sake of survival.
It's a stark peek into the nature of evil that is at once uncomfortable to acknowledge and invaluable to read and absorb. The propagation of evil from forces unexpected is what makes Wiesel's book resonate today. As we consider the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Dili and Liquica Church massacres in East Timor, the Rwandan genocide (dramatized in the superb film, "Hotel Rwanda"), or most pertinently, the detention camps that exist today in North Korea, it is obvious that the Third Reich did not have a monopoly on justifying such slaughter. With his two older sisters, Wiesel was able to survive the camps and share his devastating story with future generations. Compressed from a much larger memoir Wiesel wrote in Yiddish, the book represents a powerfully affecting treatment that edits the key moments of his existence to their essence. The result is elliptical and startling.
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Powerful is an understatement
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I recall when I first read 'Night', 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 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 longest short 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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Touching
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This personal account of the holocaust by Elie Wiesel's book is a horrifying story of the Nazi death camps. The author tells the story in a simple manner, yet it is easy for a reader to end up feeling haunted by the accounts in "Night". It stirs sadness and profound questions in the bosom of a reader. The lessons from this book about the evil side of fallen human nature and the faith, courage and moral strength to fight the evil must never be forgotten. I recommend this book to any reader interested in the holocaust and the specter of mass killings plaguing the world today. Also recommended are: SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ, DISCIPLES OF FORTUNE
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