Night - book review

I never read this book in high school or college, but I just finished it now! My husband is back in school and is in an intensely thought-provoking Holocaust class this semester, which I have vicariously been taking myself in terms of interacting with some of the assignments - Night being one of them.

Night was written by Elie Wiesel, who was a 15-year old survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and one who lost his entire family in its wake.

Though this 100-page memoir is brief, the gruesome subject of World War II's underworld as described in story form from eye level made my heart feel like it was trudging through thick mud. One reviewer said, "Night is a terrifyingly personal account of horrific events." Story draw you in; and this story does just that, even though, at times, your heart repulses from being drawn.

As a Christian, I found that many of Wiesel's statements  challenged my traditional, pat answers about God and His sovereignty, His mercy, His whereabouts in the midst of such horrific suffering. Though young, this boy was a devout and faithful Jew whose faith could not surmount all that unexpectedly came his way, but "Wiesel’s struggles with God are much more complex than a simple journey from complete faith to a belief that God no longer exists," says one reviewer. Wiesel reveals in Night that there are many shades of grey in reality. These are the struggles of the human heart when life is not black and white. I feel that seeing his struggle in the grey areas will only strengthen me in mine if I will choose to engage with the difficult questions that come from those who have suffered or are currently suffering.

I feel that I identify with Francois Mauriac, a devout Roman Catholic, writer, and proponent of Wiesel's work who wrote the Forward to Night. He had this to say after meeting the young Wiesel after the war's end:

"And I who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost?...That is what I should have said to the Jewish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep."