Night by Elie Wiesel is a short book, but one of the most important firsthand literary accounts of the Holocaust. It describes Wiesel's experience as a Jewish teenager deported with his family to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald.
Wiesel begins as a deeply religious Jewish boy living with his family in Sighet, Romania. He is fascinated by Jewish mysticism and believes strongly in God.
Then the Germans deport the Jewish population. Wiesel and his father arrive at Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister are immediately separated from them and murdered.
Wiesel and his father survive forced labor, starvation, beatings, disease, and the death marches. His father eventually dies at Buchenwald shortly before liberation.
The book ends with Wiesel looking at himself in a mirror after liberation. He says that what he sees is the face of a corpse looking back at him—a powerful image of how thoroughly the experience has changed him.
1. The destruction of human dignity
The Nazis don't merely try to kill people. They systematically strip prisoners of their names, possessions, families, religious identities, and sense of individuality. Wiesel receives a number instead of being treated as a person.
The question underneath the book is: What happens to a human being when every institution that normally protects human dignity disappears?
2. The struggle with God
This is probably the book's deepest personal question.
Wiesel begins as a boy with an intense faith in God. Auschwitz forces him to confront suffering that seems impossible to reconcile with a loving or just God.
His faith doesn't simply disappear. It becomes angry, questioning, conflicted. He sometimes feels that God has abandoned His people.
That makes Night much more than a historical account. It is also a spiritual argument with God.
3. The relationship between father and son
Wiesel's relationship with his father becomes one of the things keeping him alive. They depend upon each other.
But the camps also create a terrible moral pressure: when survival depends upon food, warmth, and physical strength, even love and family loyalty can be tested.
The death of his father is therefore not simply the loss of a parent. It is the collapse of the last connection Wiesel has to his previous life.
4. The danger of indifference
One of Wiesel's most important themes is not simply that people can become cruel. It is that people can become indifferent.
The Holocaust required enormous numbers of people to look away, obey, participate, or decide that what was happening to someone else was not their concern.
Wiesel's later life made this idea central to his message: indifference toward suffering can become almost as dangerous as hatred.
5. The transformation of a person
The boy who enters the camps is not the same person who comes out.
He loses innocence, security, religious certainty, family, and his assumption that the world is basically intelligible and just.
That is why the title Night is so effective. "Night" means literal darkness, but also spiritual darkness—the experience of living in a world where familiar moral rules seem to have disappeared.
There are many histories of the Holocaust, but Night does something different. It makes the Holocaust personal and intimate.
You aren't reading statistics about six million murdered Jews. You are following one boy:
arriving at Auschwitz with his family
being separated from his mother and sister
trying to keep his father alive
being reduced to hunger and exhaustion
questioning God
watching people die
finally being liberated
And that is precisely why the book remains so powerful.
The great lesson of Night is that the Holocaust was not only the murder of millions of people. It was the systematic attempt to convince human beings that other human beings had no value.
Wiesel's answer was to remember them—and to make sure that future generations could not say, I didn't know.
If you want, I can also give you a really good 5–7 paragraph book-review-style discussion of Night, including its strengths, weaknesses, and how it compares with Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz.