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Rated of 5

Night begins in 1941, when Elie is twelve years old, having grown up in a little town called Sighet in Transylvania; in 1944, Germans are already in the town of Sighet and they set up ghettos for the Jews. After a while, the Germans begin the deportation of the Jews to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Once they arrived in At Birkenau, a place in Auschwitz, Elie separates from his mothers and sisters, and stays with his father. Elie starts to make friends, and tries to survive in the concentration camp. He also starts to make a strong bonding with his father and they start living for each other. After one year of suffering, Elie’s father dies of Dysentery, and Elie is forced to take care of himself. In the end, he looks at himself in the mirror, instead he looks at a “corpse” in the mirror, and he sees how much he has changed the past one year.

When I first saw this book, I picked this because of the author of the book, Elie Wiesel, a famous holocaust survivor. I thought that this story was going to be an ordinary child labor story. But after reading this I was feeling more matured, and I can understand how he missed his childhood. I also felt that I was not one of the unluckiest one to face such a tragedy. Night is not a normal tragedy story, but a Story starts gloomy, and Ends gloomy. But the biggest thing in the end is that, Elie realizes that the youth is no longer in him. He says that he has changed a lot, and sees an adult in him. “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.” (pg.115, passage 6) Some parts of the book made me feel sorry the Jews who died. The part where he was talking about watching his dad dying was the most piercing, and touching part. “No prayers were said over his tomb. No Candle lit in his memory. His last words had been my name. He had called it out to me but I had not answered. I did not weep, and deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might found something like: Free at last! …” (pg.112, passage 4 and 5) These quotes touched me and made me to go in that story. After reading this book, I asked myself these questions: What if I was in that same situation that Elie Wiesel faced? How would I react to it? On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this book a nine. This book affected me so much, and also made me more religious.

Reviews from the Oprah Winfrey book club: “A true story that we would rather not think about, but need to hear and remember.” I agree with this because I never read such a violent and emotional book than this, but we need to hear and remember these stories so then we don’t do the same mistakes again. “Night is not, however, primarily about making the reader sad or dwelling on the past. It is about remembering. Wiesel wrote his memoir so that we would remember what happened and remember what civilized humans are capable of.” And also this part of the segment says: “Remembering, however, is not a fruitless task. We remember so that we can tackle the big questions honestly and so we can change” This is what happened to me while reading the book. Overall Night is the story of Elie Wiesel, a survivor whose belief of god and humanity died during holocaust.