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Night by Elie Wiesel Analysis

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Published: Mar 13, 2024

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'Night' Is One Of The Most Important Books Ever

On September 30,1928, a boy was born in Sighet, Romania. That boy would go on to lead a long and creatively fruitful life, but his mother, father, and younger sister would all die during the second World War. Many years after the war, he would write about his experiences surviving the German concentration camps with such harrowing detail that it would bring the realities of Auschwitz and Buchenwald to life. This man, of course, was Elie Wiesel, who died on Saturday, July 2 . During the course of his life, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and wrote, among other works, a critical piece of literature: Night . And if you've never read any of his work before, now is the time to begin. As the world celebrates Wiesel's contribution to the world — not only did he write 57 books, but he illuminated the terrors of the concentration camps so that others would understand what he and other prisoners experienced — take this opportunity to read Night .

The reason why I'm insisting is that Night is one of the most important books ever written. I don't say that lightly. In 1944, Wiesel (a Romanian-Hungarian Jew) and his family were deported to Auschwitz. For the better part of the next year, Wiesel would witness unthinkable acts over and over: his mother and baby sister taken away to the gas chambers, children burned in the crematoriums, a young boy hanged while the entire camp was forced to watch. Although he would survive, he would watch his father weaken during their forced labor, a death march through the snow, a bout of dysentery, and a beating by SS officers (which Elie, or Eliezer, as he called this version of himself, overheard but couldn't stop). Eventually, his father was taken to the crematorium. Three months later, the Allies liberated Eliezer's camp, but he would have to navigate his newfound freedom on his own.

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Few have experienced anything like what Wiesel went through during World War II. It's sometimes easier to look at the number of Jewish men and women who died during the Holocaust — six million — and think, "I can't comprehend a tragedy on this scale." Night boils that tragedy down to one boy's struggle to survive, and, in doing so, makes the abhorrent waste of millions of lives seem shockingly close.

I first read Night three years ago, during a course on the literature of the World Wars. I had read Vera Brittain's A Testament of Youth , a somewhat interesting nurse's memoir, and Mrs. Dalloway : a lyrical novel, but one that often distances itself from the realities of war. I began reading Night , the next title on the reading list, around nine o'clock one night, and didn't stop until I had finished reading. Night is a slim book — the prose is spare and tight — but its short length and unadorned style make its words all the more electrifying. The following afternoon, after I'd taken a break for lunch, I returned once again to Wiesel's book. As I read sentence after sentence describing men watching each other die of starvation and sickness, I had a panic attack. My heart began to flutter in my chest, and my breathing came so fast that I was afraid I'd faint. I had to call my boyfriend and ask him to sit with me until I calmed down.

"Why did reading this make you so anxious?" he asked.

The answer was easy: because I couldn't get the horrors of what I'd read out of my mind. The images were burned there, and I hardly slept for days. Even still, when someone mentions the Holocaust, I think of Wiesel's descriptions of Auschwitz and Buna. I think of young Eliezer, watching the smoke that rose from the crematorium chimneys. I think of him struggling to care for his dying father as he recognizes that leaving his father behind gives him a better chance of survival. I think of him praying to have the strength to never abandon his father — to never give in to complete desperation.

Wiesel at Buchenwald. He's in the second row, seventh to the left.

Night is so crucial because it showed me that the Holocaust happened to individuals, not to a mass of strangers. It has changed the way the world conceives of genocide by putting a face and a name to such terrible suffering. And it shows the beauty in the broken: the fact that Wiesel survived and got a chance to write. Theodor Adorno famously said that " Poetry after Auschwitz is impossible. " Because of Night , I know that Adorno is wrong. Writing literature about the Holocaust, and similar barbaric acts, is necessary . It creates a link between the reader and the writer — empathy, in other words. It makes us, the readers, recognize that the Holocaust happened and could happen again.

For all these reasons, Night embodies a terrible kind of beauty. It's the rare book that teaches us how to lead better, more responsible lives. To honor Wiesel's life and legacy, read it here .

Images: Wikimedia Commons ; Macmillan; Wikimedia Commons

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Common sense media reviewers.

Unforgettable memoir of teen who survived the Holocaust.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Night is one of the few books that recounts the ex

Strong message about the power of memory and human

Wiesel and his father cared for and supported each

The violence is terrifying, random, and sadistic.

Parents need to know that the late Elie Wiesel's Night is one of the most widely read and accaimed Holocaust memoirs. Wiesel was 15 when he, his three sisters, and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. In spare prose, Wiesel recounts the unimaginable horrors of life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the loss…

Educational Value

Night is one of the few books that recounts the experiences of teens during the Holocaust. Wiesel's memoir offers a detailed and harrowing account of day to day life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald -- the starvation rations prisoners were fed, the freezing barracks in which they slept, the days spent as slave laborers, and the constant brutality of the guards and even fellow prisoners.

Positive Messages

Strong message about the power of memory and human resilience. Because of books like Night, the story of the Holocaust will never be forgotten.

Positive Role Models

Wiesel and his father cared for and supported each other through the most unimaginable circumstances.

Violence & Scariness

The violence is terrifying, random, and sadistic. Wiesel witnesses guards throwing children into a fire and a young boy being hung. People are shot and beaten to death for no reason. A son kills his father for a piece of bread. Wiesel is lashed 25 times by a guard. The fires burn day and night at the ovens.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that the late Elie Wiesel's Night is one of the most widely read and accaimed Holocaust memoirs. Wiesel was 15 when he, his three sisters, and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. In spare prose, Wiesel recounts the unimaginable horrors of life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the loss of his deeply held religious faith. "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.” While Night is assigned reading in middle and high schools around the world, parents should be aware that the violence and brutality in the book are shocking and often unceasing. For speaking out against injustice, violence, and repression, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (9)
• Kids say (36)

Based on 9 parent reviews

Parents should read this with their children: violence, sexual references, and heavy topics

Not for kids. more disturbing, detailed, graphically violent that other holocaust stories. sexual abuse of minors, nudity, sexual references. you will likely lose innocence and sleep., what's the story.

As NIGHT begins, Wiesel is living with his family in Sighet, a town which was then part of Hungary. Deeply religious, he spends his mornings studying the Talmud and his evenings in the local synagogue. For most of Sighet, the war seems far away and there is confidence that the Russian Army will arrive before the town falls to the Nazis. But in the spring of 1944, the Germans arrive and the entire Jewish population is soon loaded onto the cattle cars that will transport them to Nazi death camps. After they arrive at Auschwitz, Wiesel and his father are separated from his mother and sisters but manage to remain together during the nightmare months that follow. As the Russians approach Auschwitz, the prisoners are forced on a deadly march through winter snows before being taken by train to Buchenwald. It is there that Wiesel's father dies, in circumstances that will forever haunt him.

Is It Any Good?

Harrowing, heartbreaking, and brutal, this unforgettable memoir of a teenage survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald is essential reading for anyone studying the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel tells his story in a voice that is quiet and spare. Only the most essential words are needed to describe the horrors he witnessed. Wiesel has stated that Night begins where Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl ends. For teens whose knowledge of the Holocaust goes no further than the young Dutch girl who wrote, "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart," Night may be hard to process emotionally. For all readers, it could help begin difficult discussions about the nature of good and evil in the world.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk how books like Night help us to better understand history. What can you learn about this period in history from a personal memoir that you can't learn from a textbook?

Have you watched any movies or TV shows about the Holocaust? How accurately do you think they portrayed what is was like to be a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp?

Author Elie Wiesel and his family had a chance to escape before being transported to Auschwitz. Why do you think they decided against it? What would you and your family have done?

Book Details

• Author : Elie Wiesel
• Genre : Autobiography
• Topics : Great Boy Role Models , History
• Book type : Non-Fiction
• Publisher : Hill and Wang
• Publication date : January 1, 1956
• Number of pages : 120
• Available on : Paperback, Nook, Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : September 28, 2021

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How to Get Holocaust Education Right

“Educate them about the Holocaust.”

That’s the rallying cry for many of those who feel shocked by skyrocketing antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses and K-12 schools. Learning about the Final Solution, the reasoning goes, steers young Americans against bigotry.

As the grandson of Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivors and an educator and documentary filmmaker who often tells Holocaust-related stories, I used to subscribe to this notion. But I’ve come to realize that despite being embedded in K-12 social studies, world history, and English literature curricula throughout the country, Holocaust education has failed to uproot hate and ignorance.  

Social media, where teens spend about five hours a day on average, teem with “ Holocaust denial and distortion ,” as well as antisemitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories. The latest, for instance, falsely blames the Jews for Congress’ TikTok crackdown . No wonder K-12 schools’ incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia have skyrocketed , even before the Israel-Hamas War erupted and broke the hydrant of hatred wide open.

Read More: Who Needs Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2024?

In recent weeks, a flood of Israel-Hamas War-related hostility has forced an increasing number of university administrations around the country—such as Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Southern California—to summon the police in an attempt to quell student protests. Columbia moved all classes online on the eve of Passover, suspended some protesters , and threatened to expel those who’d occupied a campus building. USC revamped its commencement plans. And although most protests have played out as legitimate political activism reminiscent of the 1960s student movements, some have reportedly crossed the line into antisemitic and Islamophobic vitriol and violence.

On campuses and schoolyards, Jews and Muslims have suffered physical and psychological harm—from being jabbed in the face by a flagpole and requiring hospitalization to being called “terrorists” and needing mental-health counseling. The U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office has been investigating several universities and school districts.

Holocaust education, in its foundational intention, was supposed to nip much of this in the bud. Taught at elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the country since the 1970s, it’s been positioned for wide impact. Twenty-six states require the instruction of the Holocaust. Most of the other states have funded commissions and councils to advance opportunities to educate students about the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews and millions of people with disabilities, homosexuals, and Romani people, among other groups.

Read More: The Holocaust Began Not With Concentration Camps, But With Hateful Rhetoric. That Part of the Story Cannot Be Forgotten

Historically, conservatives and liberals alike have embraced Holocaust education. The 2020 Never Again Education Act passed by a 393-5 vote at the U.S. House of Representatives and unanimously at the U.S. Senate. Further setting Holocaust education up for success, nonprofits ranging from USC’s Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, have been supporting teachers for decades. Organization like Pittsburgh-based Classroom Without Borders have taken educators to the sites of Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe. On May 5, March of the Living is sending teachers and students, as well as the chancellors and presidents of SUNY (State University of New York), Towson, and other universities, to Poland. Stateside, 85 Holocaust museums and memorials have hosted countless school field trips.

Yet, Holocaust education has fallen far short even of its fundamental goal to raise awareness. Polls show young Americans lack “basic knowledge” about the Holocaust. About two-thirds know nothing or very little about Auschwitz and grossly underestimate the number of Jewish victims.

Alarming conversations I’ve had with students make it impossible for me to ignore these statistics. Following a university screening of a rough-cut of one of my documentaries, “ Cojot ,” two freshmen sheepishly told me they’d “never heard of this.” I assured them few have heard of French business consultant Michel Cojot’s quest to kill his father’s Nazi executioner.

Shaking their heads, the freshmen said they’d “never heard about any of this.”

They were talking about the Holocaust.

The encounter sent me on a mission of my own: help fulfill Holocaust education’s promise. I started by contemplating what knowledge, insights, and skills their students must obtain to put antisemitism and Islamophobia in the rearview mirror.

A couple of observations informed my thinking about the knowledge part of the equation: Traditional Holocaust education’s emphasis on disseminating historical facts has generated disappointing results and, in the long run, even A-students retain only a fraction of the information they absorb in school. They ofttimes memorize a lesson, regurgitate it on a test, then discard it from their brains.

So I focused on insights and skills, which tend to be stickier. An understanding of how democracies function and malfunction can stay with children and adolescents for life, sharpening their worldview and lending them a moral compass. Critical thinking, fact-finding, and active listening can boost empathy and productive civic discourse, enabling students to better navigate the present, past, and future.

In building this approach, I combined old methods in a new way. For a pedagogical anchor, I turned to practitioner inquiry, also called action research. This well-regarded yet underutilized professional development (PD) mechanism helps K-12 teachers examine and improve their practice. I hypothesized that although it was rarely if ever used in such a way, practitioner inquiry would upgrade Holocaust education when fitted with four lenses: contextual responsiveness, which enables educators to make their lessons relevant to the here and now; trauma-informed, which steers them away from age-inappropriate material and assists them in identifying and coping with trauma in their classrooms and schools; apolitical educational equity, which values every child and adolescent; and asset-based, which directs teachers’ attention to their students and communities’ strengths. 

To test this properly, I founded the nonpartisan, pedagogically orientated Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State . It provides PD programs in five states and counting to K-12 educators, many of whom know what but not how to effectively teach difficult topics.

The first rule of the initiative—to borrow a phrase from David Fincher’s “Fight Club”—is you do not have to talk about the Holocaust. Research my colleagues and I have conducted indicates the effective instruction of any difficult topic, be it slavery or evolution or gender, can get at the Holocaust’s underlying causes.

Participants in the initiative’s programs, who represent various roles, disciplines, and grade levels, choose a difficult topic from their curriculum or community. They learn to teach it confidently by conjuring up compelling questions, finding credible sources, collecting and analyzing data, examining the findings with experts and colleagues, drawing up an implementation plan, and applying it in their classrooms and schools. Thus, they meet their students where they are in authentic ways.

Our participants, who include nearly as many music and biology as social studies and English teachers, empower their students to come up with their own guiding questions and seek the truth and its implications for themselves. To teach in this unconventional manner, educators must shift from acting as sages on the stage to setting the stage for their students’ experiential learning.

This mindset change typically requires a mind-twisting effort. Why would teachers—already overburdened meeting state, district, and parental expectations—add this to their trays? Their motivations range from resetting the tone in their classroom to removing the perception of indoctrination to redefining student success. A longtime elementary school teacher, for instance, aimed to make her Civil War lessons more thought-provoking. “I was interested in ways to help my students think for themselves,” she told me. And a mid-career middle-school teacher sought to instill empathy in her seventh-graders. Referencing Jim Crow and Nazi propaganda, she challenged her students to investigate her thesis that “if you spend enough time talking negatively about people, you start to believe it.”

She tasked her students with logging “everything they said and heard in one day.” The hands-on assignment opened the seventh-graders’ eyes and, eventually, hearts. They reported hearing numerous hurtful judgements and “conversations about fighting,” the middle-school teacher said. “The data collected were overwhelmingly negative.” In the following weeks, the students “wanted to talk about it more” and grew to “understand why they do what they do and reassess what they say about each other.”

Much of K-12 looks far into the future. Ace biology or math now and become a doctor or coder later. Difficult topics inquiry offers students immediately useful takeaways. The empathy and active-listening skills they develop can enrich their inner and social lives. The two-way respect they forge with peers and adults can bolster their communications and self-esteem.

To give students a brighter outlook, individually and collectively, and fortify our democracy, we must reinvent how we teach difficult topics. We must trust students to chart a constructive course for themselves and society. This will forge a sense of control that can propel students on journeys of discovery, during which they learn to conduct primary research, triangulate the information they gather, seek multiple perspectives, and dialogue and debate with classmates. Ultimately, too, it would prompt our next generation to wonder why any student ever chose echo-chamber scorn over face-to-face, heated-yet-respectful civic discourse.

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Ari Emanuel Condemns Netanyahu, Drawing Boos at Jewish Group’s Gala

“For the good of Israel, he should go,” Emanuel, chief executive of the media group Endeavor, said of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s conservative prime minister.

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By Marc Tracy

While accepting an award from a major Jewish group on Wednesday night, the media executive Ari Emanuel condemned Israel’s conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for his leadership since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, a conspicuous statement from one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures.

Those remarks by Emanuel drew both applause and boos , as well as some departures from the gala . On Thursday, the group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that the timing of the comments — while Emanuel was receiving the highest honor it bestows — was not appropriate.

“Netanyahu doesn’t want a peaceful solution,” Emanuel said at the gala, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by the entertainment conglomerate Endeavor, where he is the chief executive. “And it’s become clear that getting to a political solution and Netanyahu remaining in power are irreconcilable paths.”

Emanuel also said of Netanyahu: “As for his responsibilities to keep the people of the state of Israel and Jews across the globe safe, he has obviously failed spectacularly. But he has succeeded wildly in using division to stay in power.”

Later in his remarks, Emanuel added, “For the good of Israel, he should go.”

Emanuel’s commentary about Netanyahu came in the concluding section of his speech. A video shows some attendees getting up and leaving.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center was honoring Emanuel, the superagent satirized by Jeremy Piven in the HBO show “Entourage,” with its Humanitarian Award at a gala in Beverly Hills. The organization administers the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and describes its mission as “fighting antisemitism, defending the State of Israel and teaching the lessons of the Holocaust.”

“While our membership, like the Jewish community at large, contains a healthy range of opinions, the Center’s gala is not a platform for personal political opinions,” Erik Simon, a spokesman for the center, said in a statement.

Prominent leaders in both the United States and Israel have questioned the political endgame after bombings and incursions into Gaza that have killed more than 35,000 people and displaced many more. The country has been responding to the October attack in which Hamas killed 1,200 people and abducted 240.

Emanuel began his speech by noting that his family had adopted its surname in honor of an uncle, Emanuel Auerbach, who was killed during a protest in Jerusalem in 1933. As a child, Emanuel said, he repeatedly visited Israel with his family.

“This is a painful and crucial moment for all of us who are Jews and who love Israel,” he said. “It is not a moment to stay silent.”

He defended Israel’s war as “justified” and condemned a popular pro-Palestinian slogan, “From the river to the sea,” as genocidal.

But Emanuel also stood up for his right to speak out as an American Jew.

“It is up to the Israeli people to choose their own leaders,” he said. “Israel is a democracy. But as Jews, we have a stake in this. We also have a responsibility to speak out. We are called to ‘repair the world’ — ‘tikkun olam.’ And, as Elie Wiesel said, ‘Sometimes we must interfere.’”

Nicole Sperling contributed reporting.

Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York. More about Marc Tracy