Night

Reviews (See all 6,355) Write a reviewfor this

• 
  

  I'll admit that I'm of a morbid cast. When I meet those folk who think that people are okay, and the world is okay, and all we really need to do is hope real hard and work real hard, I don't find such people optimistic; I find them brainless.

  I read Night in two sittings, unable to put it down. Here was a story of a young man who worked hard, and hoped hard. For all that, in his descent into and through the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he lost land and home, friends and family, love an... (show more)

  I'll admit that I'm of a morbid cast. When I meet those folk who think that people are okay, and the world is okay, and all we really need to do is hope real hard and work real hard, I don't find such people optimistic; I find them brainless.

  I read Night in two sittings, unable to put it down. Here was a story of a young man who worked hard, and hoped hard. For all that, in his descent into and through the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he lost land and home, friends and family, love and faith.

  The way he dispenses his anger surprises. His anger, first, is at God, for granting a good and faithful people such a miserable fate. Then at himself, for not being invulnerable. He spends little energy on the Jews for failing to survive the German will to destroy them. Oddly, little blame either for that genocidal German will. One of the most chilling lines in the book comes from a fellow patient in a hospital explaining why he believes in, and thus fears, Hitler: "He is the only one who kept all his promises to the Jews."

  This is more the world I know. Ours is the generation of Mandela, we who watched the Berlin Wall disappear, and who await the end of the Troubles of the Irish. But Rwanda is ours, too, and Sarajevo, and Darfur. Ours is the hope of monsters, straining upwards onto our hind legs to assume the stature of men. It's why, I think, I love Night, for its stern warning of what awaits us if we fail. (show less)

   

  by Facebook-gebruiker on Apr 29, 2009 at 07:53PM

  Already read

  Is this review helpful? yes no
   
• 
  

  In a self-obsessed culture based on individual happiness, reading something about the suffering of another person is an odd exercise. To remove oneself from the incessant narcissistic din of "buy this sell that", to be still with the words and heart of another person who has suffered loss and injustice and deprivation of a sort we can't even comprehend - this is an important thing. For the greatest abuses of power and authority would seem to come about in an environment where no o... (show more)

  In a self-obsessed culture based on individual happiness, reading something about the suffering of another person is an odd exercise. To remove oneself from the incessant narcissistic din of "buy this sell that", to be still with the words and heart of another person who has suffered loss and injustice and deprivation of a sort we can't even comprehend - this is an important thing. For the greatest abuses of power and authority would seem to come about in an environment where no one believes that such abuses of power and authority could ever come about. If we focus only on Self, we never see the truncheon of The Other until the first blow has landed.

  "Night" should be required reading for everyone. It is a deceptively short and simple book. It is unadorned. It does not wax poetic. Such wax was stripped away long before the author set pen to paper. It is the rawness, the simplicity of suffering that pervades these pages. Denial, shock, confusion, hope, anger, hate, despair. These are the only adornments you will find here. They are the only adornments left to Wiesel.

  It is easy for some people today to insist that the lessons of the Holocaust have already been learned and need not be focused on. Those who wish to dispense with the necessity of empathy in suffering and injustice risk exposing themselves too readily to those very things.

  The power of this book is in helping one to realize that abuses of power are rarely foreseen by the abused. That the chief weapon in exerting control and maintaining it is to prevent people from knowing that it's coming, or that it is ongoing at the moment. The baffled expressions of 1930's and 1940's Jews that such atrocities could not be happening in such a modern era are instructive. As instructive as the recent Iranian election disputes, or ongoing censorship efforts in China. Technology can be circumvented to a great extent, even completely silenced in some cases. There is no guarantee that the world will know when you have been imprisoned, deprived of your human rights and treated as an animal fit only for slaughter. And even if the world does know, the world is very unlikely to care, or more importantly - act.

  If we suffer, we are very likely to suffer cut off from human commiseration, from the hope of rescue, from the opportunity for defense. If we suffer on any scale remotely approaching that of mid 20th-century European Jewry, we will likely suffer very much alone except for the abiding presence of God. Justice will remain where it has always remained - in His hands. We will simply be made more keenly aware of that fact when we are laid low in death. (show less)

   

   

  by Paul Nelson on Jul 10, 2009 at 03:12PM

  Already read

  Is this review helpful? yes no
   
• See all reviews
  Write a review