Night

A fifteen-year-old boy and his father are deported to Auschwitz. In 120 pages, Elie Wiesel tells what happened with a brevity that makes every sentence carry the weight of the unspeakable.

Why Start Here

Night is the only place to start with Wiesel because it is the testimony that everything else builds from. Written with a restraint that makes it more powerful than any longer account could be, it follows young Eliezer from his devout Jewish childhood in Sighet, Romania, through the gates of Auschwitz, through the death marches, to liberation. Along the way, he watches his faith in God and in humanity stripped away, layer by layer.

What makes Night different from other Holocaust memoirs is its compression. Wiesel revised the original manuscript (over 800 pages in Yiddish) down to 120. Every word that remains carries the weight of the words removed. The result reads not like a memoir but like a prayer, or perhaps a prayer’s opposite: a cry into the silence where God used to be.

What to Expect

A very short memoir that can be read in one or two hours. The prose is plain and the tone restrained. The content is devastating. One of the most-assigned books in American schools and one of the most important moral documents of the twentieth century.