A memorial edition of Elie Wiesel's seminal memoir of surviving the Nazi death camps, with tributes by President Obama and Samantha Power
When Elie Wiesel died in July 2016, the White House issued a memorial statement in which President Barack Obama called him "the conscience of the world." The whole of the president's eloquent tribute serves as a foreword to this memorial edition of Night. "Like millions of admirers, I first came to know Elie through his account of the horror he endured during the Holocaust simply because he was Jewish," wrote the president.
In 1986, when Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wrote, "Elie Wiesel was rescued from the ashes of Auschwitz after storm and fire had ravaged his life. In time he realized that his life could have purpose: that he was to be a witness, the one who would pass on the account of what had happened so that the dead would not have died in vain and so the living could learn." Night, which has sold millions of copies around the world, is the very embodiment of that conviction. It is written in simple, understated language, yet it is emotionally devastating, never to be forgotten.
Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. Night is the shattering record of his memories of the death of his mother, father, and little sister, Tsipora; the death of his own innocence; and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man.
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night," writes Wiesel. "Never shall I forget . . . even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself." These words are etched into the wall of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Far more than a chronicle of the sadistic realm of the camps, Night also addresses many of the philosophical and personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of the Holocaust.
In addition to tributes from President Obama and Samantha Powers, this memorial edition of Night includes the unpublished text of a speech that Wiesel delivered before the United Nations General Assembly on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, entitled "Will the World Ever Know." These remarks powerfully resonate with Night and with subsequent acts of genocide.
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
September 12, 2017 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780374717261
- File size: 767 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780374717261
- File size: 767 KB
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 570
- Text Difficulty: 2-3
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Reviews
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Kirkus
Starred review from August 1, 2017
A reissue of Wiesel's (Open Heart, 2012, etc.) foundational, exemplary memoir of the Holocaust.Even though bracketed by post-mortem appreciations by Barack Obama, genocide scholar and former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, and Wiesel's son Elisha and including Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech and lecture and a commemorative address before the U.N., Night is a slender book, just a shade more than 100 pages long. But it packs a whole world--perhaps better, a whole inferno--into that brief span, much trimmed from a draft reported to be eight times longer. As the memoir opens, Wiesel is a schoolboy in a Transylvanian town, studying with a wise scholar named Moishe the Beadle, who liked to say, "Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him." The great question that emerges as events sweep in, brought to Sighet on German troop transports and Hungarian police vans, is, of course, why? No fully satisfactory answer ever emerges from Wiesel's tour of the hell that ensues, as the ghetto--"ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion"--gives way to the concentration camp and its endless brutalities, administered by Germans and kapos alike. As he recounts the flight before the advancing Red Army deep into a collapsing Germany, Wiesel draws on the voices of many of his fellow inmates, one of whom memorably says of Adolf Hitler, "he alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." Only the promise of utter extermination goes unfulfilled, leaving the author to contemplate the dead man walking that he has become when the camp is finally liberated: "The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me." Wiesel's memoir, first published in English in 1960, has emerged as a classic work of literature from that darkest of eras, and it deserves to be read and reread for decades to come.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
Levels
- Lexile® Measure:570
- Text Difficulty:2-3
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