Night, by Elie Wiesel (pub. 1956, in Yiddish; 2006, Marion Wiesel translation)
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So. This is actually a pretty short book. When Wiesel first wrote it, it was very long. But it got edited down quite a lot (from 862 pages to 245) before it was first published in 1956, under the title Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent"). It was edited down to 178 pages when it was translated from Yiddish into French in 1958, under the title La Nuit ("The Night"). And in 1960, it was edited down to 116 pages for the English translation, as Night. I have read none of those versions. The version I read was re-translated into English in 2006, by the author's wife, Marion Wiesel. Though in my copy, it's still around the same page count as the first English translation (not counting the author's preface to the new translation, the foreword by François Mauriac, and Elie Wiesel's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech from 1986, which is printed at the back of the book. Anyway... even the first English translation preceded my own existence by fifteen years, but I must have become aware of the book's existence sometime in either the later stages of elementary school or in high school. And it's something I've always intended to read, someday. But I didn't get around to it until 2017. (In retrospect, it's probably for the best that I didn't read it in high school, because obviously the 2006 translation didn't exist yet. While I can't say how the newer translation compares to the older one, let alone the Yiddish or French versions, I do get the impression from Wiesel's preface that the newer one is probably preferable, as he says (quite understandably) that his wife "knows my voice and how to transmit it better than anyone else." He also says "as a result of her rigorous editing, I was able to correct and revise a number of important details." So, anyway.... I guess I still could have read this version eleven years earlier than I did. But again, I think this was a very good year to read it. And it reminded me of a book I read last year, The Devil's Arithmetic, which dealt with the same subject matter. And I thought it was good that I read that book last year, just as I'm glad I read this one this year. It's because the subject matter has, sadly, become quite relevant given the current political and social climate in the United States, which has (as many recognize and many others ludicrously deny), major parallels to the situation in Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Well. It was a week after I finished reading the book before I got around to writing the first paragraph of my review, which doesn't even have anything to do with the story being told. And the story itself... well, from what I gather online, it's sort of semi-autobiographical, or semi-fiction. The author talks about his own experiences as a teenager during World War II, though I'm not clear on exactly how much of it is an accurate representation of his actual experiences, and how much is... something else. Either way, I don't believe there is anything in the book that could genuinely be considered "lies," per se. And of course some of the tone, as well as countless details, have surely been altered over the course of the various edits and translations. But the version I read remains a powerful account of the reality experienced by millions of European Jews during the war, regardless of how much of it was the reality experienced by Elie Wiesel, himself. In any event... it was nearly a week after I wrote the first paragraph that I could bring myself to continue writing my review. And by then, two weeks after I'd finished reading it, the intensity of the feelings I'd had while reading it had diminished somewhat. (I'd like to be able to claim my procrastination was mostly due to being overwhelmed by the book's power, or my anxiety at the idea of trying to adequately convey that power. But while there may be some truth in those things, I'm afraid it has more to do with the extreme difficulty I almost always have, in recent years, with making myself do any of the things I want to do. But I don't want to get off on a tangent about my own issues.)

Anyway, it begins in 1941, when Eliezer Wiesel was almost 13 years old, living in the town of Sighet, Transylvania. I don't want to say too much about that early period, just that he was interested in studying as much as he could about the Jewish religion. The first chapter covers a few years, in just a few pages, before reaching spring of 1944, when Eliezer was 15. Throughout the rest of the chapter, there are various stages where Eliezer describes the progression of events leading up to the deportation of Jews from their homes. It seems at each stage, there is among the people some degree of fear mixed with denial. Always there was hope that the war would soon be over, and the deportation wouldn't happen. (And reading this story so long after the war, I couldn't help but feel like their hopes were correct; the war was almost over. In fact, the entire book- except for the few pages leading up to 1944- takes place over the course of a single year, ending in spring of 1945. But of course, a single year can be a very long time, while you're living it. Especially the kind of year described in Wiesel's story. Meanwhile, I also couldn't help but compare- as I mentioned earlier- the denial of the inevitable by the characters in this book- and surely by real people, at the time- to the denial of so many people in my own present about things that are happening now, in America.) By the end of the first chapter, people are forced into cattle cars on a train, packed almost too tightly to move.

The next chapter describes the horrors of the transportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, in Poland. I can't describe it, except simply to use that phrase: the horrors. At the start of the next chapter, Eliezer and his father, Shlomo, are separated from Eliezer's mother and his three sisters (two older and one younger). Eliezer would never see his mother or youngest sister again. ...After a few weeks, Eliezer and his father and the rest of the male population of Birkenau were transferred to the Monowitz-Buna camp, where, it seems to me, the majority of the book is set. In January 1945, as the battle line drew closer to Buna, the Nazis forced their prisoners on a walk of many miles through the snow, so that they could not be liberated. After finally reaching Gleiwitz, those who remained alive were once again packed into cattle cars, and transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany. The brief, final chapter, is set in April, and tells of the surviving prisoners' liberation. (I speak of chapters, but they aren't numbered, as such. But there appear to be nine chapters. If you want to call them that.) Throughout the book... we are told through Eliezer's first-person narrative, what life was like in (and between) the camps. And again, I really can't describe any of it. But aside from the horror of it all, a major theme of the book is Eliezer losing his faith in God. How could God let this happen? Why should anyone continue to praise Him, when He allowed such suffering? And how could the people of the world allow it?

As I mentioned earlier, at the end of the book (I mean to say, after the book), a speech that Elie Wiesel gave in 1986 is presented, and it is itself quite powerful. It speaks of atrocities that were then still going on everywhere in the world. And, reading it in 2017 is much like reading Wiesel's account of his experience, in the final year of World War II, in that it can't help but remind one of the present. Or, for that matter, any period in human history. There are always terrible horrors. Yet there is also always hope, even if we may sometimes lose our own hope. So... as hard as it is to read books like this, they are important. And speeches like the one at the end of the book are also important. I don't really have the words to express... how imperative it is that we never forget the past, and never ignore the present, and never stop striving to create a better future. And that is all I can think to say.