by Happy writer

Created on: May 28, 2008

Comparing Night to a food that sums it up

Now if you're the type that likes the "feel good, I like to escape to a better place" kind of novel, read no further. This novel/autobiography will definitely not take you there. Where it takes you is into the heart of darkness, madness and the terrifying reality of human suffering. "Night" is a punch in the gut memory of the holocaust . It will make you cringe, squirm, think and it will, if you are capable of it, make you cry. "Night" to me is like eating Liver and onions!. It smells foul, you chew, chew and chew and eventually, if you're lucky, it will slide down your esophagus, get jammed and be wretched out before it hits your belly. This is "night". A brutal insight into the world of Hitler, the Nazis and all the other cowards that supported the questionably short, ugly,evil, cloven-footed beast from Austria.

This happened, and is still happening in other parts of our world. We look back and ask how could this have taken place? Yet we do not question why today, this happening in other parts of our world? It's like Vietnam, a war we can now talk about, a war that is no longer taboo. Yet we fail to acknowledge, on a daily basis, what we are voluntarily or involuntarily letting slip through the net. There are millions of unnoticed people suffering and being wiped out in the same apathetic; "it's not my business", turn a blind eye manner as the Jews were during the second World War, Wiesel strong thought "Action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all", unfortunately bears weight today.

If like me, you have seen and visited countless documentaries, literature, and movies about the holocaust, nothing will really shock you in Wiesel's novel. Yet, it's his first person narrative that gets you all stirred up. We all remember the documentaries picturing men and women no more than skin and bones, with stripped overalls and bare feet drudging through the barren settings of the concentration camps. The mounds and mounds of human bodies sprawled, naked. barbarically on top of each other in deep open graves. The chimneys, the monstrous chimneys....the piles of cases, clothes, relics, hair. We have all seen these documentaries. They affected me at a very young age, that is for sure. There is nothing new to Wiesel's story, nothing we couldn't imagine before. but unlike the documentaries where no one has a name, Wiesel tells his story.

He is a boy who dreams. He is a deeply observant Jew. He is a boy who loves his family, a child just as we once were. Through this human document he becomes personal to the reader. Therefore the nightmare that unravels around him is so hard to bear. This book is a struggle. A struggle with all. The struggle to survive, the struggle to keep faith, the struggle of the psyche, the struggle of morality. Above all , it is a lesson, a reminder, an account that this happened then, is happening now and we are all responsible. As Elie Wiesel says in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace prize

"We must take sides, Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion,or political views, that place must-at that moment-become the center of the universe.".....

"Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices."

I have nothing left to say...

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