Night

This book totally affected me. I don't remember ever being so physically and emotionally caught up in any book like I was with this one. I cried, I thought about it throughout the day, I dreamt about it in the night. Elie Wiesel wrote the most haunting account of his young life. From being ripped from his home to being separated from his mother and sister to caring and feeling responsible for his father in his journey from concentration camp to concentration camp. It shows the depths of human despair and the height of out of control power.
Narrator George Guidall brings life to the book. He was perfect. Listening to this book instead of reading it literally brought Elie Wiesel right into your heart. Mr. Guidall had the inflection, pain and weariness in his voice that really brought it home. He is obviously familiar with some of the important Jewish prayers like Kaddish (the prayer said for the dead). He ripped out my heart when he began to recite it.
I can't say enough about the importance of this book. Please listen to it. It is essential to use the lessons you will learn in the book to make you a better person. You won't be the same after this one.

This book is very well written and told. The author is able to give you just a glimpse of the pain he and others suffered at the hands of evil rulers, evil followers and even persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany. You realize how easy it can be for men to be broken and for animal nature to kick in and take over. You learn how one's soul can be broken to a point that you wonder how they can ever come back, yet even as broken down as they were, they continued to fight to live each day in a horrible hell. It brings across the point of how easy people choose to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that life is just fine, that human beings could never be so cruel to other human beings and how pathetic we can be when we choose to ignore another's plight because we just don't want to get involved. It makes you think twice about who you are and what you stand for and it breaks your heart to know that the persecuted people hoped over and over that someone would come to help them and yet we failed them for so long. This book is so applicable in today's times and should help to awaken anyone questioning human suffering in other countries and brings across the point that we cannot stand idly by while others in the world are suffering persecution at the hands of evil rulers and terrorists.

I came across this book rather by accident in watching a show on the History Channel called the Boys of Buchenwald. It mentions some excerpts from this and I went in search of it here.

This is truly a powerful, emotional book. It moves you as you hear it in first person, told through the eyes of a teenage boy witnessing the worst murders committed in recent history.

All I could think of was my own 12 year old son, picturing him walking the path that Elie walked. My heart broke repeatedly, but some how in all of it, his strength and resolve was there, deep inside, even when he didn't see it in himself.

I recommend this to everyone I know now. It will change you.

Highly acclaimed author Elie Weisel recounts his personal account of the Holocaust from his youth in Siget to the bowels of Hell in the concentration camps. His first hand account is an excellent personalization of horrors experienced by 6 million Jews - a number that is impossible to grasp - and allows the reader to intimately share the experience and thoughts of a Holocaust survivor.
Night is also finely written - yet not too overwelming in language or length.
Should be required reading for all High School students - of all races.

What is the lasting impact on a 15 year old son who must watch and watch-over his aging father as they struggle to just survive, day by day, the Nazi death camps of WWII. He must watch his father as he is beaten, kicked and force marched from camp to camp during freezing winters barely subsisting on starvation rations.

The son, Eliezer, is a devoted Orthodox Jew pursuing his religious studies, already faltering because of the roundups of Jewish men, including Rabbinical teachers. After years of increasing brutalities and deprivations in their villages and ghettos, the final journeys to the camps begin. Wiesei, a holocaust survivor himself, describes the almost unbelievable torments and tortures, the humiliations and degradations and the killings of women, children and the aged.

He ponders the universal question of man’s inhumanity to man. He addresses the inevitable questions the survivors must confront: How to react toward his former masters; Is revenge-in-kind acceptable; Why did I survive and my family did not?

Elie Wiesel was awarded a Pulitzer Peace Prize and a Congressional Gold Medal for his activities after the war. NIGHT is, in part, autobiographical. Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor. Not all of his family survived.

The writing is clear and graphic. The story is suspenseful and compelling.
This is not light reading. But the events did happen and they must never be forgotten.

My daughter had to write a paper on this. I got the audio book so I could reaquaint myself with the book too, For such a slight volume it packs a brass knuckeld punch to human self deception. It destroys the fiction that hard times bring out the best in people instead of the worst, that god can save you from the hands of mere human cruelty, and that a sons love for a father is unassailable. Yet in the end there is a type of redemption for the living. If for no other reason that to be the one to tell the story.

On my second time through this book. After reading (and re-reading) The rise and fall of the third Reich by WIlliam Shirer I wanted even more information on this blighted page in our human history. Such a sureal unfolding of genicide when you read how one survivor came back to the author's village and railed against the Nazis and begged his fellow jews to leave while they could. No one listened to him until it was too late.

Personel recording of the Holocaust from the eyes of a child.
Must be read by everyone who consider himself human.

I bought this book the week before I visited Auschwitz. Listening to it as I sat on the train--staring out the window into the bleak, snow-covered Polish countryside--was incredibly emotional. That experience is permanently etched into my memory.

Of course, even if you are not on your way to visit a concentration camp, the story needs to be heard. This audiobook is the way to hear it.

The narrator is perfect. The story is touching, memorable and chilling. A definite must-listen.

This was a great book. I'm so glad I took the time to purchase it. The narrator added so much, I will remember this story of tragic loss foever.