Night By Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel’s Night was a heartbreaking story of the realities of the Holocaust. This book was a short read and quite the page turner but to call it an easy read would be to ignore the emotional impact it has on the reader. Often times books get picked up, the words get read, a story unfolds in the readers mind, and the book is finished and put down without a second thought. This was not the case for Night. This book is one that guarantees a lasting impact on its readers who have any compassion for humankind. The heartless actions and the numbness that are retold in this autobiographical text take careful pondering and reflection to process at every page.

While this text was difficult to read in terms of processing the content, I found it to be an easy book to read in terms of being an active participant in the words rather than a passive consumer of them. I believe this is because of how passionate I am about the inclusion of Holocaust narratives, or even just the teaching of the horrific event in general, in curriculum. History has a tendency to repeat itself when we forget about the actual horrors that have occurred in our global past. The inclusion of the Holocaust in curriculum should be treated no different than that of slavery, Native American genocide and mistreatment, or any other people group that has been categorized and mistreated over the course of our earth’s existence. While this is not the only genocide that should be retold and remembered I believe that as one of the most widely known issues it is a gateway into remembering that humankind is not always good, and that true evil does exist in the world. Night offers a less widely heard of retelling of the Holocaust while still revealing the horrors that occurred and how they impacted human life.