The family lived in a community of 10,000–20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. And yet we begin again with night.' Backgroundįurther information: Hungary in World War II and Holocaust in Hungary Sighet, Transylvania, now Sighetu Marmației, Romania, 2009Įlie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania (now Romania), to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, and his wife, Sarah (née Feig). Everything came to an end-man, history, literature, religion, God. 'In Night,' he said, 'I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Night is the first in a trilogy- Night, Dawn, Day-marking Wiesel's transition during and after the Holocaust from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art. Wiesel called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir. Translated into 30 languages, the book ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as Night. The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. The memoir ends shortly after the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.Īfter the war, Wiesel moved to Paris and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ('And the World Remained Silent'). His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after deteriorating from dysentery and a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above him for fear of being beaten too. The typical parent–child relationship is inverted as his father dwindled in the camps to a helpless state while Wiesel himself became his teenaged caregiver. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown of Sighet, Romania, to his migration through multiple concentration camps. Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. New York: Hill & Wang/Oprah Book Club, 2006.) New York: Hill & Wang London: MacGibbon & Kee, 116 pages.Ġ-8090-7350-1 (Stella Rodway translation.

Night book