52 Books: #5 - Night by Elie Wiesel
Book: Night
Author: Elie Wiesel
Page count: 132
Date started: 26/01/18
Date finished: 29/01/18
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. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Such is Eliezer Wiesel's first experience of the horrors of the Holocaust, documented in his Nobel Peace Prize-winning book Night.
I've read widely on the Shoah by Gas, from witness accounts, to narrative histories and diaries from those within the camps as guards and inmates, and I will never be able to suppress the sheer weight of shock and indignation that mankind is capable of evils of such a magnitude.
I devoured the whole book in just three days, enraptured by Wiesel's frank account of his time at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buchenwald. At only fifteen, he was forced to watch his mother and sisters disappear into the crematoria and his father die slowly of dysentery. A truly humbling read, and one that becomes evermore important in the modern era.