Night

Night is about a teenage boy's experience in Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. Eliezer expresses his horrifying experiences at the camp. He was separated form his mother and sister whom he never saw again. The Jews rely on each other for moral support and religious faith to get through there experiences. They encounter multiple humiliations and work under slave-like conditions. They are severely malnourished. Night also shows how people may react in survival situations. Some of the Jews become concerned with their own survival without thinking to rely on anyone else. When the camp that Eliezer is at is evacuated they are brought to another concentration camp. Only 12 survive the journey to the next concentration camp. Eliezer's father dies dysentery and physical abuse. Eliezer dies on the same day that the American soldiers liberated the camp: April 11, 1945.

Although this is not a memoir, it is obvious that Elie Wiesel is recounting some of his own experiences in Nazi concentration camps. Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home to Auschwitz concentration camp and then to Buchenwald just like Eliezer in Night. The back cover of the novel says it in words better than I could express: "Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man".

In the classroom this book would be a great supplemental text to use on a unit on the Holocaust. I would use this in the classroom to hit the emotions of students since this is as close to a personal narrative, without it being a personal narrative, as you can get. It is important for students to learn history and gain empathy for those groups that were once disenfranchised by society. It is important to teach these aspects of history so that we can grow as human beings.