'There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don't know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival.' Elie Wiesel's perspective on his life and experience of the Holocaust is strikingly different from the one that another Holocaust survivor, Corrie ten Boom, has on her life and experience. Because of her relationship with God, Corrie ten Boom's story is one of overcoming, healing, and restoration; without a saving relationship with Christ, Elie Wiesel can make no sense of the suffering he saw and experienced, or of his survival. But he feels an urgent responsibility to testify, having been a witness to inexpressible human depravity, to speak of 'this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant . . . .' He writes: 'The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.' Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece---a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a youth in the Nazi death camps. Offering much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Night also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man. |
