D's August Review: Night by Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel

Synopsis (as taken from Goodreads): A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

D's Rating: ❤❤❤❤❤ (out of five hearts)

D's Thoughts:

I told you that Night would be here this month! To be fair, I haven't read all that many books in the past month, and it hasn't really been for excusable reasons. Nonetheless, If I had somehow managed to read 50 books this month, Night still probably would have been my favorite.

It's not like I didn't expect this book to be sad, but I was often taken aback by how graphic and disturbing Wiesel's accounts were, particularly in terms of the earliest deaths at his first concentration camp, Birkenau. Much Holocaust literature focuses on the dissolution of both God and self, but Wiesel perhaps tells it best in this passage from his first night in Auschwitz: 


Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. 
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and tuned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. 
Never.
I'm not sure why it is I love this book that disturbed me so much. Perhaps it was because I did indeed learn a lot about life during the Holocaust without censors and sugarcoating. Perhaps it was because every word was blunt but still lyrical (see the quote below). Why do I have to explain why I loved this awesome--and when I say this, I don't mean in the "yeah bruh, that's totally hip" kind of way, I mean awesome in the knees-buckling, terrifyingly wonderful way--novel. I can only marvel at how frightening the situation it describes is, how appalling it is that it is not a work of fiction and that there were people who did not think twice about sending young children into fires and gas chambers because of their lineage and family  beliefs, and wonder how the author has found the strength to write so many books (Night is a far cry from his only work, though it is the most popular) about his experiences. I'm not sure what else to do but cry.

Standout Quotes:

While there are many outstanding quotes from this book, I am only including this one, because it is the one that a) is most personal to me as a musician and b) the quote that still makes me want to crawl under a blanket and cry for hours, though I did not do so when I came across it and I still have yet to do so.

"...All I could hear was the violin, and it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again.
   I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and the dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.
   I don't know how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over, dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse."Album to listen to while reading this book: Not an album, but instead this movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto that my best friend and I have agreed had to be the piece that Juliek was playing the night he died.

~D