End Review: Night

            I’d just like to say that my final post about Night won’t do justice to Elie Wiesel’s book.  Having said that, this was an incredibly powerful story.  In my first post about Night, I said how I had never read a book by someone who had actually lived through the Holocaust.  This story was a real eye-opener, and while it is certainly not the only book written by someone who had to go through the Holocaust, I feel like it gave a thorough view of what it must have been like to go through the ghettos and camps.

            Although the subject matter was grim and disconcerting, the book in and of itself was satisfying to read.  I myself have sometimes questioned the veracity of God, and I haven’t even been through anything like the Holocaust.  I tend to rest my doubts upon more “scientific” and “practical” matters, but Wiesel still kept his broken relationship with God on a spiritual level, something I haven’t really thought about a whole lot.  Wiesel shares that at one point, he saw “next to me were two corpses, side by side, the father and the son.  I was fifteen years old” (96).  How could God have been with him, with the other prisoners, if Wiesel had just witnessed a son beat his father to death, and two men beat the son to death?  Also, I am fifteen years old now.  I cannot even fathom seeing family members kill each other left and right.  It seems then, that God had deserted him.  And, if Wiesel still found the strength to pray, it was “to that God in whom [he] no longer believed” (87).  The idea that there could be an all-powerful being gave him hope and restored his faith, but when it came to specifics, the God he had revered for most of his life no longer fit the bill.

            Night is an autobiography, a chilling, non-fiction account of life in the face of death.  I think it is because of this raw perspective, this idea that skeletons still had minds, that sometimes I couldn’t believe what Wiesel was sharing.  I never thought he was lying, but at times I was utterly shocked that what seemed so dramatized could have been Wiesel’s reality.  If his God no longer protected him, what could have let Wiesel survive?  I’d imagine it’s because I’ve never been faced with such difficult predicaments that I had trouble wrapping my head around some of what Wiesel wrote.  I think sometimes elements that are associated with fiction seem to appear in non-fiction because we haven’t experienced everything, so it is hard to understand everything.