Is Night By Elie Wiesel A True Story?

I read ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel after my friend had read it and strongly felt that it had changed her perspective on life and therefore I felt I had to read it too in order to see how it had affected her. I found that whether or not ‘Night’ is true is really insignificant once you have started reading it. The images that Wiesel created for the reader are so graphic and so real that you wouldn’t even doubt what he was trying to convey to the reader. All of the details that he included such as the cattle cars that they were put in to get to the camp, the process of selection, the Kapos, all of these things are detailed in other historical accounts of the time and they are described in such horrific detail that it makes you shudder.

When Elie Wiesel originally wrote Night in Yiddish he created a longer work than what is currently read by masses of people all over the world. Yet when translated into Hebrew and revised Wiesel slims down the longer work creating a hauntingly sparse account of his time in concentration camps. Every non-essential detail is cut from the book allowing the reader to experience the fully horrors of genocide as Wiesel did. There are some minor inconsistencies regarding the timing of events but Wiesel is well aware of how trauma to human memory. In terms of capturing the essence of the soul that was lost in the Holocaust and how that was taken from a child and a son from his father — that is something that no work of fiction could possibly capture or even attempt to.

'Night' wrecked me. I’d heard it was sort of autobiographical, but nothing could have prepared me for how intensely personal Night feels. Teenage Wiesel pulls you through his experiences and you feel his confusion, his starvation, and his desperation as hope turns to dust. We all know that Wiesel went to Auschwitz and to Buchenwald as a teenager and returned to tell the tale. But what he actually went through is contained in these pages, in the tiny details of his experiences at the concentration camps: the taste of soup, the smell of burning human flesh, his father’s weakening voice.

The afterword is remarkable. He wrote Night because “silence helps the oppressor” and that is the underlying drive for this book. Every sentence appears to be driven by that impulse, and as a result, the book reads like a warning, etched into bone.

Reading ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel has been an experience like holding a piece of history between the pages of a book. It is not just a memoir of his experiences during the Holocaust, but a first-hand account that has been transferred onto paper with raw emotion. Auschwitz, the loss of his family and the desperate longing for hope in such dark times are just some of the things that Wiesel recounts throughout the book. I had previously read an interview with Wiesel where he explained how he had written ‘Night’ as a way of bearing witness to the atrocity of the Holocaust. His words on the pages of ‘Night’ are a heavy burden for the world to carry but thank God that they have been transferred onto paper. On one occasion I was reading an account of the hanging of a young boy for not covering his head sufficiently quickly. The account of this event in ‘Night’ was verified by other Holocaust survivors. This book has left me feeling stunned and able to return to reality only after some time spent staring at the wall in front of me. How could humanity be so cruel yet at the same time so resilient in the face of such horror?

What was most profound in the afterword to ‘Night’ was the author’s struggles to find adequate words to convey his horror. As Elie Wiesel recalled, there were many years when he was unable to write about the Holocaust because he couldn’t find the words. Yet, in the end, he managed to force himself to tell his story in all of its raw and unpolished detail. In many ways, ‘Night’ stands out from other Holocaust memoirs not least because of its brevity and simplicity. It is the account of a young boy’s desperate struggle to survive against all odds in Auschwitz. I have read many other accounts of the Holocaust. None of them has ever affected me as much as ‘Night’. That is why ‘Night’ is studied in schools. You can never ‘intellectualise’ the horrors of the Holocaust. ‘Night’ makes you feel them.