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wombatjenni 's review for:
Night
by Elie Wiesel
I've read over the years, since I was a kid, quite a lot about the Holocaust. I've seen movies and TV series. Read about it in school. I've read fiction.
Yet this is the first time I've read a first-hand account of someone who survived a concentration camp, and in its few pages this memoir devastates. What an amazing story.
Hollywood movies and fictional stories about the Holocaust tend to glorify the heroes and the liberators, or those who somehow kept positive and not losing hope, or the spies who infiltrate and destroy the system from the inside.
What Wiesel writes about is how the Holocaust, in addition to taking away friends and family members and communities - often by forcing people to participate in the destruction of their loved ones - decimated one's beliefs in a higher power that's watching over you and protecting you; it destroyed faith in fellow human beings who looked away. It illustrates the baffled disbelief at how things could get this far.
With all this devastation to the human spirit, Wiesel, whose survival seems to have been dictated by luck rather than our usual heroic stories of tenacity and the will to live, still emerged with an urgency to always, always speak on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves, and defend those who aren't capable of doing so themselves.
Yet this is the first time I've read a first-hand account of someone who survived a concentration camp, and in its few pages this memoir devastates. What an amazing story.
Hollywood movies and fictional stories about the Holocaust tend to glorify the heroes and the liberators, or those who somehow kept positive and not losing hope, or the spies who infiltrate and destroy the system from the inside.
What Wiesel writes about is how the Holocaust, in addition to taking away friends and family members and communities - often by forcing people to participate in the destruction of their loved ones - decimated one's beliefs in a higher power that's watching over you and protecting you; it destroyed faith in fellow human beings who looked away. It illustrates the baffled disbelief at how things could get this far.
With all this devastation to the human spirit, Wiesel, whose survival seems to have been dictated by luck rather than our usual heroic stories of tenacity and the will to live, still emerged with an urgency to always, always speak on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves, and defend those who aren't capable of doing so themselves.