I Read Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’.

Most people who have referenced this book have talked about it as one that they read in school, but somehow it escaped me at that time in my life. Holocaust literature is not something I gravitate towards, nor should anyone seek out, but in order to more completely understand and empathize with the conditions of the oppressed and the unjustly persecuted, this book really explores and examines how a lack of humanity can forever alter our perceptions of who and how we are as a society.

Nazis have disappeared but their churning and inhumane hate has not.

One thing about this book that I learned which really moved me is that it began as a manuscript that initially spanned over 800 pages. This must have been a deeply raw text, one of hurt, one of pain, one of visions and realities that are impossible to recreate. I imagine a rambling dialog with a God which Elie doubts then denies, I imagine an even darker retelling of this very story. I imagine more death. More hell. To whittle this down to a story that goes just over 100 pages is both a sharpening of the knife, but also, in ways, a profound undercutting of how affected the author was by this event. How can we, as readers, get closer to this experience if that experience has been abridged? While this text is potent, powerful in ways that its reputation precedes, it feels like for readers who are bold enough to lean closer, I feel like this “only” scratches the awful surface.

One thing I wish I was able to read more into was the apostasy which Wiesel and the other people around him were forced to recognize. Both their passion and love of their God is expressed in the way they looked and sung to them in praise, but also in loss by degrees, the inverse is presented as true as well. Abandonment. Abject lifelessness. So many moments of this book direct a darkness towards not only physical conditions, but spiritual conditions as well.

This book is tough to “rate”. I think the text is fantastic, a lesson that we all need to understand, to digest and make peace with. But I don’t necessarily recommend it, as it holds as an iconically bleak read. There is no hope within. There is no reprieve. Read with the knowledge that you are going to be brought face to face with the evils we all know to be found within.