Night by Elie Wiesel

Night is a book about the holocaust, so if you're interested in that, then go ahead and read it, but if I were to describe this book in one word it would be: horrible.

Eliezer (or Elie... he's a boy) lived in Transylvania, Romania with his father, mother, and 3 sisters. A Jew from his town, called Moshe the Beadle was deported in 1942, and returned to warn everyone in town about the Germans and the horrible things he saw. No one believes him, not even Elie, but him and his family are taken to Auschwitz. There, the family is separated, boys from girls. Elie and his father see that people  and particularly babies are being thrown into a fire at the crematory. One of the most memorable parts of the story for me is where the Germans go around camp looking for the strongest men. Elie hopes they will choose him so he can get away from the camp for a while. He does not get chosen, and later when he finds out what happened he is glad. A "strong" man returns and says that he was forced to throw people into the fire, and one of those people was his own father.

The prisoners move to Buna, a different camp, after a short stay at Auschwitz. With difficult times in concentration camps Elie is always questioning his faith in God.  Him and his father survive beatings and selections of who will be burned in the crematory. They go on train rides where people murder each other for scraps of bread. In the winter, the prisoners are relocated, and they go on a long march in the snow. Elie and his father support each other, but later he becomes focused on his own survival. The difficult march takes them to Buchenweld, where his father falls terribly ill (SPOILER and eventually dies a really terrible, haunting death which I will not describe because you have to read it to find out. But that death has stuck with me... END OF SPOILER) Of course, he got out of the camp, or else he wouldn't be able to write the book, but I recommend you read it to find out how.

So, this book was different... I think the Holocaust is really interesting, but I can't even imagine what it would be like to be in a concentration camp. Based on his descriptions, it's amazing that Elie suvived. I've read Anne Frank, but this book is not really like that.

I can't exactly decide how I feel about the book though. Night definitely had it's flaws. First off, it was difficult to follow the characters. Elie and his father weren't bad, but he met so many other people, and they all had name's I've never heard of. He'd mention someone that he met earlier and I can't even remember who they were and when he met them. To add to that, it's a bit harder language. Not really hard, you can tell what's going on (unlike Treasure Island. I was clueless through that whole book!). But you've got to focus. Doze off for a few seconds, and you've missed something.

This was not a boring book. It was very interesting. There was never any boring chapters. It was hard to read because it was so sad. Ellie is great at describing what happened and how he felt, and it's not happy. So the reason I described it as horrible was not because it was bad, the stuff that happened in it was horrible, you know? I learned a lot of new things about concentration camps and those places are truly horrible. It was actually hard for me to read this book because there was some stuff I just didn't want to know about. To think something that terrifyingly bad happened to normal people! I've learned about the holocaust and researched it, but it's still hard for me to wrap my head around it because of how horrible it was. That's the best word to describe it, really!

I'll add a few more words to describe Night, and to sum up: well written, interesting, depressing, insightful, descriptive, difficult. I guess I would recommend it because it's a new experience, and I've never read anything like it. A-