"Night"

My latest read was "Night" by Elie Wiesel. A little background on the book and its author:

• It was originally published in 1958 in French
• In 1986 Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize
• It is considered to be a part of the memoir genre
• His original memoir was written in Yiddish and was over 900 pages long
• It is part of a trilogy with the second and third books titled "Dawn" and "Day"

I'm not sure about all the different publications but the copy I read had a foreword written by Wiesel. (Side note: Always. ALWAYS. Always read the foreword. The author is trying to tell something important to the reader but you won't know what it is unless you read the foreword!) I'm not sure about the entire publication and translation history of "Night" but Wiesel's foreword gave a huge amount of insight into how difficult it was for him to write his story. My copy was published by "Hill and Wang" and is the entire trilogy.

It's hard to find things to say about this book. I'm afraid that something I say will either not do it justice or in a way "disrespect" the grave subject. But here is my attempt to say something worth saying.

This book didn't really do anything to make the Holocaust "more real" for me. I've learned about all the physical torture these people went through so that wasn't especially new for me. What did become real was the psychological and mental torment that they were put up to. There was a big build up to the whole point, which I saw as being that by the end he and the other prisoners were living for a piece of bread. They didn't live for family, for themselves, or the joy of being alive. They lived for something that you and I wouldn't even call a snack. What would you have to go through to live for a bread crust and nothing else? What would your mind and soul have endured?

In Wiesel's preface he said that he wasn't sure if he wrote his book to prevent madness or "to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness." At first I though he meant the madness it would take to cause a holocaust. Maybe that is what he meant. But I understand it to mean that only madness can understand what madness feels like, what it brings upon a man, and how unforgettable of a feeling it truly is.