Night by Elie Wiesel | Teen Ink

Night by Elie Wiesel

August 2, 2012
By angela.wong20 BRONZE, Reno, Nevada
angela.wong20 BRONZE, Reno, Nevada
1 article 0 photos 3 comments

Night by Elie Wiesel is a very personal and emotional story based on the author’s true life experiences during the Holocaust. It shows Wiesel’s journey from the ghettos to different concentration camps and how he loses faith in things he used to believe in along the way.

This is the first story about the Holocaust I’ve read that is based on personal experiences. The others have been stories based off of facts and are just assumptions of the life of someone who went through the horror of the war. Knowing that the events in this book actually happened to the author makes it a bit more realistic and intriguing. You’re almost able to imagine yourself in his position and understand the range of emotions he goes through.

A lot of fiction books are great because the authors can create a situation in their mind and make it as realistic as possible for the reader. With Night, a nonfiction book, you constantly remind yourself that the gruesome and horrid events that you read about have actually occurred in history. It’s hard to think that the dreadful situations in the story are not imagined by the author, but that he experienced and survived them.

Most stories that I’ve read about what happens in concentration camps really lack detail compared to this one. The other stories lack the most gruesome events to spare the reader from being disgusted. But Wiesel leaves out no details when it comes to the horrors of what happened to him, his father, and so many others in the different camps.

This book keeps you captivated the entire time; always wanting to know what will happen to Eliezer (Wiesel) and his father throughout the years in the war. It’s interesting to see how much Eliezer changes over the course of the novel. His beliefs, priorities, and thoughts on humans are all altered by what happens to him in the camps.

Wiesel did an amazing job at describing his experiences for us. Each act of cruelty becomes etched in your mind, breaking your heart when you imagine real people dying as described in the story.

This book makes you question what you would do if you were in Eliezer’s place. Would you support your father or leave him behind? Would you question your religion or rely on it to keep you alive? Would I have tried to forget the awful experience or remind everyone of what happened like Wiesel later did?

This book is a great reminder to everyone of how cruel the Holocaust was and how history should never repeat itself. I suggest to everyone that they read it as it tells you details from inside the concentration camps that you wouldn’t imagine have happened and as a great reminder of a terrible time in history.



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on Aug. 24 2012 at 7:58 pm
Laurencstegman BRONZE, Pleasant Valley, Nevada
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This is a great review on the novel, and I really acknowledge mix of both novel review and personal opinons.