Night

A gripping real life story of a boy growing up in Sighet, a town north of Transylvania during the height of World War 2.  Elie Wiesel shares the atrocities that he and his family faced when this Jewish community in Hungary was invaded by the Nazi Germans in 1944.  What follows in his book, Night, is the horrific reflection of the “night” that went on and wouldn’t end.  From the beginning something’s about to happen, a former community member who had been apprehended and escaped, came back to warn everyone, but people paid him little heed.  No one thought the horrific stories he told of burning bodies, shootings of innocent people, or starving corpses could ever occur in the twentieth century.  And then on March 18, 1944 at midnight, all changed for the Wiesel family and all of their community when they were herded out like animals out of their homes and transported from town to town and left at concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald to face the most abominable images one can ever imagine… family members separated and led to crematoriums, pits of half-dead/dead corpses, or to work camps.  Elie and his family were separated, the three sisters and mother led to their death while his father and he were brought to a camp.  For the next year and a half Elie shares his fight against himself, humanity, and God trying to somehow survive when everyone around him was starving, being shot to death, or burned alive.  To read this book raises so many questions about how evil is still around us on Earth today.  Elie and his father make it through the seasons of heat and bitter cold, rations that would not satisfy a bird, and the dehumanizing of an entire population.  To think that there were world leaders who supported this unthinkable action is beyond words.  This is a heartbreaking story that disgusts the reader on the unfathomable lengths evil takes on the world.  The images and details conveyed are too much to comprehend.  Every person needs to read this book so that we as a society never become complacent on the worst a human can be.  To think he and his father made it through for so long, and his father to die at the very last days before being released from the horror is unthinkable.  Elie Wiesel, a man whose story lives on so other stories like this can be stopped.  A fitting time to read this book during the time of atonement for the Jewish religion, but so much more for those who intentionally committed horrors against the Jewish people.