Night (Oprah's Book Club)
by Elie Wiesel
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elie WieselBrand: Spring Arbor/Ingram
Translator: Marion Wiesel
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); French (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01-16
ISBN: 0374500010
Number of pages: 120
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Product features:
- night book paperback
- oprahs book club
- military history biography
Book Reviews of Night (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Hitler is the only one who kept his promises to the Jews
Summary: 3 Stars
I read this book when it first came out in the 60's and it made big impression on a young high-schooler. When I visited Dachau a few years later after joining the USAF and being stationed in Germany where the hatred of the Jews was still very much in evidence, I remembered the line from this book that was spoken by a dying Jew who was in the hospital with Wiesel at one of the death camps he fought to live in, that " I've got more faith in Hitler than anyone else. Hitler is the only one who kept all his promises to the Jews."
When i first read this book I was mad at the Nazis for their inhumanity, but after many decades I learned to redirect and balance my anger at those who led themselves like sheep to the slaughter. Wiesel has an interesting chapter at the beginning of this book about Moshe the Beadle, who escaped death at the hands of the Nazis and returned to tell the Jewish community in Hungary about how vulnerable they were. His advice was ignored, and when the Jews were herded up, they went without a fight as they went to the death camps, delusional to the end about the true nature of the threat until the Nazis pulled their heads out of the sand and marched them to the trains.
What I did not remember about this book until I read it again this week was that the Jewish prisoners fought and scratched, and even killed their own for a scrap of bread, but did not think that they would best be served to act like humans instead of sheep and fight back as many did in the Warsaw ghetto. I suspect if they had taken out one in ten Nazis who rounded them up, there would have been no gas chambers or ovens since the Nazis would have been depleted to nothing. Wiesel ultimately came to this realization in his later years.
Wiesel's descriptions in the book are fundamentally the story of those who would only take bread from the weakest of the flock as they moved from camp to camp, knowing that their ultimate fate was to die at the hands of the Nazis in the ovens. A scrap of bread to live another day was the trade-off for their own claim to humanity. It is essentially a study of a refusal to pay attention to the reality of the threats to the Jews that Hitler and other made, but also a story of human cowardice on a grand scale.
I can now understand why this weakness only encouraged the bullies, just as other weak leaders such as the New York Times owners praise the United Nations, which is only united in calling for the end of Israel and the death of the remaining Jews on the planet. But just as millions of Jews got on the trains taking them to their deaths did so without a fight during the Nazi era, millions more are repeating history by ignoring the fact that sheep do not eat wolf stew. It goes the other way round.
I gave this book three stars because it is an average. The descriptions of the horrors of what the Nazis did, as well as what the Jewish inmates did to each other to survive deserves five stars, but Wiesel was essentially clueless when he wrote this book over 40 years ago in understanding how his own actions and those of his fellow Jews made them less than human, and thus reinforced the view of many Europeans that they deserved the ovens that they tended as prisoners until they were too weak to load their own parents bodies into the furnaces and added to the flames when they were finally selected for the gas chambers.
Nothing has changed, with the leader of Iran calling for the destruction of Israel, and the USA being the lone voice calling out for the UN to condemn anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism. And indeed you have people such as the ambassador from France calling Israel a "shi**y little country" unworthy of a future, and dozens of American Democrats such as Jimmy Carter's loathsome new book comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, and other politicians demanding that the US join the "international community" in condemning Israel for defending itself.
Wiesel did what he did to survive, as did millions of other Jews, but their weakness invited the bullies to depravity, just as it does today. I suspect that the chorus will be the same once the Iranian nukes wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. This book is a study in how they will have brought it on themselves by acting like sheep instead of humans. And of course the world will look the other way, just as Clinton did when the Hutus slaughtered nearly a million Tutsi's in a three-month period but chose not to get involved. His approval ratings are off the charts, even though the holocaust in Rwanda was more intense over a few months than Hitler's was against the Jews over a decade.
C'est la mort.
But I suspect that Carter will continue his attacks on the Jews, and his book will be cited on Al Jezera and other propaganda arms all over the world as justification for supporting jihad, and NY will vote overwhelmingly Democrat in the next election. Talk about not connecting the dots!! Those dots will probably lead to the death of millions in the country you cannot find on a map in the Middle East which happens to be called Israel.
Wiesel finally grew and understood that it is human nature to favor the "stronger horse" and the political parties in Israel are a reflection of the political delusions in play in the major cities with large Jewish populations in the US today. It is unfortunate that the later editions of this book did not include his late awakening of this reality.
If you are looking for a book that covers this issue in a far better way than this short review, you might consider Mamet's "The Wicked Son" written by a Jew who understands what is at stake in today's world. But Wiesel's book is really an embarrassment and a look into how men can become mice, and be treated as such if they do not stand up for themselves.
As the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and Iran is about to perform a nuclear repeat of the 1930's because too many around the world would rather look the other way as the UN Security Council delivers "peace in our time" once again.
Summary of Night (Oprah's Book Club)
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.
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