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Introduction

Night is a work by Elie Wiesel based on his experience, as a young Orthodox Jew, of being sent with his family to the German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Second World War and the Holocaust.^[1]

Wiesel was 16 years old when Buchenwald was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945. Having lost his faith in God and humanity, he vowed not to speak of his experience for ten years, at the end of which he wrote his story in Yiddish. It was published in Buenos Aires in 1955, and in May that year, the French novelist François Mauriac persuaded him to write it for a wider audience. Fifty years later, the 109-page volume, described as devastating in its simplicity, ranks alongside Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature.^[2]

Wiesel deploys a sparse and fragmented narrative style with frequent shifts in point of view.^[3] The recurring themes are his increasing disgust with mankind and his loss of faith in God, reflected in the inversion of the father-child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and the teenager becomes his resentful caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever."^[4] In Night, everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a Kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."^[5]

Night is the first book in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, and Day—reflecting Wiesel's state of mind during and after the Holocaust. The titles mark his transition from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall.^[6] "In Night," Wiesel said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."^[7]