Night is an account of Elie Wiesel’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It was first published in French in 1958. The edition I read was translated by the author’s wife Marion Wiesel published by Penguin in 2006. I became aware of Wiesel’s work through Lawrence L. Langer. Langer writes about orientation and atrocity and uses Night as an example of a volume that confronts the reader directly with death (Langer, 1975, p. 75). To Langer the book is a sequel to Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (p. 77). The title, Night, refers to the endless darkness of the atrocities and specifically to two nights, one at the beginning and one at the end of the author’s account. The book opens with the experience of Wiesel who was a child at the time, and his family travelling to Auschwitz. He describes his disorientation on arrival. “When had we left our home? And the ghetto? And the train? Only a week ago? One night? One single night?” (Wiesel, 2006, p. 37). The unreality of the experience was true also in my reading of his initial journey. Towards the end of the book Wiesel describes the march he, his father and other prisoners took to Buchenwald. Again the night is poignant. “And the night seemed endless” (p. 103). This is just before his father dies. Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. His acceptance speech appears at the back of the edition I read. He died in 2016 aged 87. My reading is part of the questions I have relating to Jerry Berman’s experiences and the Holodomor more broadly. How and where to confront audiences directly or indirectly with atrocity.
