First Published: 1972

Rating: Excellent

"They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname."

I picked up Elie Wiesel's Night early one morning with the intention of reading a little of it before I fell asleep. Instead, I stayed up until I finished the 115-page book--and then spent another hour or so digesting what I'd read. Anyone out there who thinks short books just don't have the impact of their longer counterparts--tell me that again after you read this one.

Night is somewhere between novel and autobiography; I can't tell where reality mingles with fiction, and honestly, it doesn't matter. The story told in this book happened, and it happened to far too many people. It's the story of the year a young Jewish boy--Wiesel himself--spent in concentration camps during World War II.

It's a story shared by millions of Jews, Christians, homosexuals, gypsies, and other victims whose voices were lost in the Holocaust. Wiesel speaks for them all with simple eloquence, but that doesn't make the atrocities of the war any easier to read. And it shouldn't--the things that Wiesel speaks of should trouble us as we read them, and they should trouble the next generation, and the next, and the next.

I think a lot of people avoid reading books about World War II because they don't want the sort of images that Wiesel creates in their heads. I'd argue that that's exactly why we should read books like Night--so that we never forget what took place in those concentration camps. And even though most of us will never come close to grasping what Wiesel and others went through, we need to read about it, so that we can get some inkling of what it was like to live in the shadow of a human furnace.

In the preface to the latest version of Night, Wiesel includes the ending to the Yiddish translation of his book:

I am not so naive as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world.

Books no longer have the power they once did.

Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.

A few years ago, I passed up the chance to hear this man speak. I wish now that I hadn't, but I'm very glad that I read Night. My recommendation: read it, think about it, let it shake you up and trouble you, and share it with others. And don't be among the silent.

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