Night

"This was published by Elie Wiesel and now is probably the best known memoir that has been written about the experience of the death camps. Elie Wiesel was a young boy of 14 when his tiny city, a place called Sighet, mostly Jewish, in what was then the Romania-Hungary borderland, was overrun. You have to remember that until 1944, Hungarian Jewry had been spared the most extreme forms of Nazi violence. But in 44 the situation changed and the Nazis essentially took over much of the organisation of the Jewish population in Hungary. They came into his little town, the shtetl, and they took him and his family. He went to Auschwitz, where his father died. But he survived the war, miraculously. Then, in the 1950s, he wrote a memoir in Yiddish. It was a very long memoir, too long, and at that time he was living in Paris. He was with some French intellectuals who told him to shorten the volume and to publish a very watered down or limited version in French. Which he did – and the rest is history. It started to be read widely, and it continues to have an enormous impact all over the world. For example, a few years ago in Chicago they chose it as the book of the year that everybody in all the schools read. Also, Oprah Winfrey picked his book, the new translation, for her book club recently. So I would say of all the books that people read about the Holocaust, besides The Diary of Anne Frank , the most famous memoir is by Elie Wiesel. I think the way the personal scenes are described, the telling scene of his father’s death, the characters he is able to draw and portray and this strange twilight life that people lived. All that has enormous emotional power. And he has the craft; he is a novelist and, unlike many memoirs (which are all important and all have information and all shed light), this has a literary kind of quality. He is able to bring to the focus of the reader a deep emotional power, and something also of the mysteriousness of what happened in the camps. There was something here that really reached the limits of human experience. “There was something here that really reached the limits of human experience” I should add there are other important memoirs. The other person who deserves to be mentioned is the great Italian novelist and memoirist Primo Levi . Primo Levi’s books are also extraordinarily important. They are, along with Elie Wiesel’s, the most important record we have of first-person survivor memoirs of the camps. Like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi has great power. It is very sparse, very minimalist, very, very straight, but very powerful material."

"I chose Night because I wanted to see how concentration camp inmates fared under those horrible circumstances. You know, when I began to write A Hidden Life , which was about 14 years ago, I did a lot of research because I wanted to make sure that I could stand behind what I wrote. And I managed to track down the policeman who had been called to the house after Jim’s body was found. This was nearly 30 years after it happened. And he came here and we had a coffee and he said it was interesting for him to meet me, because he almost never meets the widow or the widower. And he said something that I also read in all these books that I’ve recommended – that the middle class and the upper class are much more likely to commit suicide than those who have to find their daily bread, so to speak. So Elie Wiesel’s book. I had read it many years ago, but I reread it. In concentration camps, the biggest goal for most of them was to get the next crust of bread. And they were already being punished by the Nazis and so they didn’t think they had to punish themselves too. And so there were very few suicides in concentration camps, which is strange when you think about it, it surely seems like a place you’d want to get away from. And the other thing about suicide is that if you feel that somebody totally needs you, you manage to hang in there. There has to be a reason for people to stay alive, there has to be hope, and there has to be somebody or something that is so important that you couldn’t possibly leave it. Elie Wiesel wrote–he was a boy in a camp–that he was considering running into the barbed wire once, but he didn’t because his father needed him. And that’s the only time he mentions the allure of suicide. “There were very few suicides in concentration camps, which is strange when you think about it, it surely seems like a place you’d want to get away from.” And that’s why I feel bad. My kids and myself were left – were we not important enough to Jim? But maybe that’s an ignorant sort of question because who knows? You just don’t know. I’ve never been in that position, of feeling suicidal, so I do not know. I used to think that maybe it took courage to kill yourself. Personally I am more afraid of death than of life."