Night

3 Pages 871 Words

Night (A Book Report)

"For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and
death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the
face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still
red, his eyes were not yet glazed. Behind me I heard [a] man asking: Where
is God now?"
The suffering of this child being hanged is comparable to the suffering
endured by many Jews during the holocaust. This quotation is found in just
one of many heart wrenching scenes found in Night, a biography of the
holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. Wiesel stayed quiet about the holocaust for
ten years and his reasoning for this was, "I didn't want to use the wrong
words. I was afraid the words might betray it." This also may account for
the fact that some of the sentences found in Night are very wordy and often
are overwhelming to the reader because of the amount of significance found in
each. This flaw, though, is very forgivable under the circumstances.
Besides for the brilliant descriptions found in Night and the feeling that
you were walking in Elie's shoes, if he literally had any, Night opens the
readers mind to the
atrocities of the holocaust and concentration camps. We take for granted,
today, our knowledge of knowing how many Jews were killed by the Nazi's and
having a general idea of the kind of life people led in the concentration
camps. People never really stop to think about what it must have felt like
not knowing what was going on or what was going to happen next. Wiesel
illustrates this very clearly at the beginning of his autobiography. He shows
the reaction of the townspeople when they first heard
of Hitler and German troops and the optimistic approach they ecided to take on
life. This technique of taking the reader to
life before the ghettos and the concentration camps is very
interesting and unique. Before reaching a...