Book Review: Night

by Moises A. Hernandez, age 17
Night, by Elie Wiesel, is based on his own personal experiences with his father in Nazi German concentration camps. Some may not consider the book a memoir since it does not follow the memories of Wiesel himself. However, it is clear that the testimony, story, and emotional truth from Eliezer—the book’s narrator—are primarily those of Wiesel. Even though some minor details are changed, what happens to Eliezer is what happened to Wiesel during the Holocaust.
At the start of the story, in the early 1940s, Jewish teenager Eliezer lives in the town of Sighet in the then-Hungarian region of Transylvania—known today as Sighetu Marmatiei and located in Romania. During this time, Eliezer studies the Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—and the Cabbala—the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible—with a teacher named Moishe the Beadle. However, his learning is interrupted when Moishe is deported for being a foreign Jew. in, led everyone on board into the woods, and murdered them according to a fixed plan. [Read More]