Book Review of "Night" by Elie Wiesel

Essay by moodeyes113High School, 10th gradeA, February 2006

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The Holocaust is a haunting time in the history of the world. The book "Night" by Elie Wiesel captures Wiesel's haunting experience during the Holocaust. A book like this is one that is not read for enjoyment, but rather for information. If one wants to be able to at least imagine what the people in the concentration camps went through, then this is the book to read. Night does not sugar-coat what happened in those camps. Wiesel tells the world what it was really like to live behind those barbed-wire fences.

Elie Wiesel wrote "Night" to inform the public of what really happened during the Holocaust. The detailed accounts that Wiesel are given to inform the world of the torture that many people incurred during this terrible ordeal. On page 46 he speaks of how kind the leader was to the children, "Like the leader of the camp he loved children."

He made sure that children were fed upon arrival, but one sentence later, one learns the true reason for this favored treatment, "(Actually, this was not disinterested affection: there was a considerable traffic in children among homosexuals here, I learned this later.) That description hardly fares in comparison with the passage on page 88 when he writes, "Some Kapos rapidly installed us in the barracks. We pushed and jostled one another as if this were the supreme refuge, the gateway to life. We walked over pain-racked bodies. We trod on wounded faces. No cries. A few groans. My father and I were ourselves thrown to the ground by this rolling tide. Beneath our feet someone let out a rattling cry."

The words that form this heart-wrenching account of the Holocaust is told with more emotion than other accounts that I have read. This account allows the reader...