Night, the short memoir Elie Wiesel wrote about his deportation from Sighet in May 1944 to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in April 1945, is the most widely read Holocaust memoir in the English-speaking world. It is now standard on American high school curricula and has sold around ten million copies in English alone. The book runs to around one hundred and twenty pages. It is the most concentrated piece of Holocaust prose in the major literature.
Wiesel wrote the first version of Night in Yiddish in Argentina between 1954 and 1956, under the title Un di velt hot geshvign, And the World Stayed Silent, and published it as one of a Buenos Aires Yiddish-language series in 1956. The Yiddish text ran to around eight hundred pages. He cut it down to around one hundred and seventy pages in French, with the help of the French Catholic novelist François Mauriac, who had pressed him to write the book in a wider language and who provided the foreword. The French version, La Nuit, came out from Editions de Minuit in 1958. The English version, Night, translated by Stella Rodway, came out from Hill and Wang in 1960. A new English translation by Marion Wiesel, the author’s wife, came out in 2006.
The book records the destruction of the Hungarian Jewish community of Sighet, Wiesel’s home town in northern Transylvania, in the deportations of May 1944. It records his arrival at Auschwitz, the selection on the ramp at Birkenau, the separation from his mother and sister Tzipora at the ramp, his survival of the ten months at Auschwitz with his father, the death march of January 1945 to Buchenwald, and the death of his father at Buchenwald a few weeks before liberation. The mother and Tzipora were murdered on the day they arrived at Birkenau. Wiesel was fifteen at the time of the deportation and sixteen at liberation.
The book is famous for its concentration. The catastrophe is presented in the prose of a teenager and most of the events are described in single sentences or short paragraphs. The prose carries the weight by what it leaves out. The most famous passage describes the hanging of three prisoners at Auschwitz, including a young boy whose body, too light to break the rope cleanly, took half an hour to die. A man behind Wiesel asks where God is. Wiesel writes in the next line that a voice within him answered, He is hanging here on this gallows. The passage is the most often quoted in the Holocaust literature in English.
The reception of Night was slow at first. The first French edition sold only a few thousand copies. The first English edition sold around three thousand copies in its first eighteen months. The book began to acquire its current standing in the late 1960s and through the 1970s as the public conversation in the United States and France about the Holocaust deepened, and reached its current position after the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and after Oprah Winfrey selected the book for her book club in 2006. The Winfrey selection put the book on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time, forty six years after first publication, and put it on around sixty per cent of American high school reading lists by 2010.
The book has been challenged on factual grounds by some scholars, including the historian Naomi Seidman, who in 1996 published a study of the differences between the Yiddish original and the French version arguing that the French was a substantially reworked text aimed at a Christian European readership and that the rage and political anger of the original Yiddish had been moderated for the new audience. Wiesel responded that the French version was the canonical one because he had personally written it, and that the Yiddish was a draft. The argument is real and the differences between the two texts are substantial, but the case rests on what kind of book Wiesel decided to publish, not on the events the book describes, which are documented in independent records of the Sighet deportation and the Auschwitz and Buchenwald registers.
Night is the entry-point for most general readers into the Holocaust literature in English. The book leads, in most reading lists, into Levi’s If This Is a Man, into Frankl, into Anne Frank, into the broader survivor literature of the second half of the century. It earns its place in the curriculum because it is short enough to read in a single sitting, because the prose is direct enough that a fifteen-year-old reader can follow it, and because the catastrophe is presented in the words of a young person whose age maps onto the reader’s own. The book is, by some way, the work of art that has carried the catastrophe to the largest readership in the world.
See also
- Elie Wiesel
- Yiddish Culture and Language
- The Arrival Process and Selection
- Anne Frank
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Sources
- Elie Wiesel, Un di velt hot geshvign, Tsentral-farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956
- Elie Wiesel, La Nuit, Editions de Minuit, 1958, foreword by François Mauriac
- Elie Wiesel, Night, translated by Stella Rodway, Hill and Wang, 1960; new translation by Marion Wiesel, Hill and Wang, 2006
- Naomi Seidman, Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage, Jewish Social Studies, 1996
- Joseph Berger, Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence, Yale University Press, 2024
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sighet deportation records, May 1944