Book Review

Night Book Review

Kyla Schuler

The book Night by Elie Wiesel is a Nobel Peace Prize award winning autobiography. The book starts out in a small town where Eli's family, which consists of his father, mother and younger sister, lives. His father receives word that the Nazis are going to come to their town and take them to a new place to live. This makes Elie worry because he doesn't know what is going to happen of where they are going to go, but his father reassures him that there will be no harm and all will be well.

Three days go by and the Nazis take Elie and his family to a “train station” where they are loaded into cattle boxes. Elie is frightened because he and his father become separated from Elie’s mother and sister. The cattle boxes are cramped. There are between 80 and 100 people per box. They arrive at a concentration camp where they are stripped of their clothes and their heads are shaved with a dull razor that cuts deep into their scalp. Then they are placed into what Elie calls “bunkers”.  Bunkers are they massive concrete room filled with flimsy beds and infested with bugs, human waste and illness.

            Weeks seem to drag on for eternity and Elie does everything possible to keep his father alive and try to manage keeping himself alive as well. It is a very grueling and pain staking life; they get up every morning and 5 o’clock sharp. They are only fed two flimsy pieces of bread and one bowl of “soup” which is made up of water and a very few vegetables a day. Elie is a very strong young boy with an even stronger faith in God. He works to the limit to keep his father and himself out of the human furnace.

            One harsh winter day Elie ends up with a server case of frostbite on his foot and had to be checked into the hospital. While he is stuck in the hospital he receives word that American forces are venturing their way to the camp to free prisoners and capture Nazi soldiers. At once the Nazis decide that they must move camps immediately and only the ill and hospitalized are allowed to stay. When hears that all in the hospital must stay he instantaneously leaves the hospital. He thinks that the reason the hospitalized are allowed to stay is so they can slaughter them. Elie goes on to the next camp with his father.  Elie later on finds out that if he would have stayed in the hospital he would have been set free in the next few days.

Elie’s trust in God slowly but steadily deteriorates while all that could go wrong in his life is going wrong. He thinks that God just up and left them to fend for themselves. He thinks that God does not care about his people. He becomes furious with God and the world and starts to go insane and think irrationally to the point of plotting to kill his sick father for an extra ration of food.

To Elie death becomes a common day thing. He sees death of children, death of the sick, death of the strong and even death of his beloved father. Elie also experiences the death of his God. Will he regain his faith and trust in the Lord? Read the book Night by Elie Wiesel to find out!

Critique

            I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It really opened my eyes to the horrors of the Holocaust and what the Nazis did to over 6 million innocent Jews. I hope to read the other two books in the series sometime in the near future. This book was hard to read at times because it was so extremely well written and had many gruelingly in-depth details. It felt like I was standing there watching it all happen. I would recommend this book if you are into history and learning about World War II and the Holocaust.