Night

Night (1958) by Elie Wiesel. This is Wiesel's slender, harrowing account of his experience as a teenager of being picked up by the Nazis and transported to a concentration camp. It is a vision of insanity, the insanity of the evil fascist, anti-Jew regime of Adolph Hitler, taken near to its extreme. Wiesel and his family were uprooted from their home and transported by rail to Auschwitz, then Birkenau. By some miracle -- it was near the end of the war -- Wiesel survived to tell the story. It has been told by others, but Wiesel tells it with immediacy and vividness that bring us as close as possible to actually experiencing itself ourselves. And it is horrible. Grade: A