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Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
An autobiographical narrative in which the author describes his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, watching family and friends die, and how they led him to believe that God is dead.
Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie Wiesel reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forget man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.
Preface to the New Translation
by Elie Wiesel
IF
IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one book, this would be the
one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night,
including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes,
profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read
this very first of my works.
Why did I write it?
Did I write it so as not to go mad or,
on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature
of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history
and in the conscience of mankind?
Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories,
to help prevent history from repeating itself?
Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal
I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one’s knowledge of death
and evil should be limited to what...
Alfred Kazin
No one has left behind him so moving a record.
If you liked Night, try these:
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