Night by Elie Wiesel - Audio Book CD
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Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply
poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the
Nazi death camps. 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.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday
perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it 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.
Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when
he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz
concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying
record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of
his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting
the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most
frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and
presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony
to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this
horror must never be allowed to happen again. This edition also contains a
new preface by the author.
About the Author Elie Wiesel
Eliezer Wiesel, KBE (commonly known as Elie Wiesel, born September 30,
1928)is a Romania-born American-Jewish novelist, political activist, Nobel
Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of over 40 books, the
best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences
during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps.
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel
Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," noting that through his
struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total
humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death
camps," as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace," Wiesel has
delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to
humanity
On November 30, 2006 Wiesel received an honorary knighthood in London,
England in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in
the United Kingdom.
Contents
Early life and experiences during the Holocaust
Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of
Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. Sarah was the daughter of Dodye Feig,
a Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Elie Wiesel had three sisters:
Hilda and Bea, who were older than he, and Tzipora, who was the youngest
in the family. Shlomo was an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a
shopkeeper who ran his own grocery store. He was active and trusted within
the community, and had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish
Jews who escaped to Hungary in the early years of the war. It was Shlomo
who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to
learn Modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged
him to study Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel has said his father represented
reason, and his mother, faith (Fine 1982:4).
The town of Sighet was annexed to Hungary in 1940. Then Elie, his family
and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos in Sighet.
Elie and his family lived in the larger of the two, on Serpent Street. On
April 19, 1944, the Hungarian authorities deported the Jewish community in
Sighet to Auschwitz–Birkenau. While at Auschwitz the number A-7713 was
tattooed into his left arm, and became an avid smoker. Wiesel was
separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, who are presumed to have
been murdered at Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father were sent to the
attached work camp Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz III Monowitz. He
managed to remain with his father for a year as they were forced to work
under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the
closing days of the war. On January 28, 1945, just a few weeks after the
two were marched to Buchenwald and only months before the camp was
liberated by the American Third Army on April 11, Wiesel's father suffered
from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, and was later sent to the
crematory. The last word his father spoke was “Eliezer”, Elie's name.
After the war
After the war, Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage, where he learned
the French language and was reunited with both his older sisters, Hilda
and Bea, who had also survived the war. In 1948, Wiesel began studying
philosophy at the Sorbonne. During this time, Wiesel became involved with
Irgun, a Zionist armed organization in Palestine, and translated for its
newspaper.
He taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a
professional journalist. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers,
including Tsien in Kamf (in Yiddish) and the French Jewish Magazine,
L'arche. However, for 10 years after the war, Wiesel refused to write
about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. Like many
survivors, Wiesel could not find the words to describe his experiences.
However, a meeting with François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in
Literature, who eventually became Wiesel's close friend, persuaded him to
write about his Holocaust experiences.
Wiesel first wrote the 900-page tome Un di velt hot geshvign (And the
World Remained Silent), in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form
in Buenos Aires. Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in
French, and it was published as the 127-page novel La Nuit, and later
translated into English as Night. Even with Mauriac's support, Wiesel had
trouble finding a publisher for his book, and initially it sold poorly.
Life in the United States
In 1955, Wiesel moved to Manhattan, New York, having become a U.S.
citizen: due to injuries suffered in a traffic accident, he was forced to
stay in New York past his visa's expiration and was offered citizenship to
resolve his status. In the U.S., Wiesel wrote over 40 books, both fiction
and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. Wiesel's writing is
considered among the most important works in Holocaust literature. Some
historians credit Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present
meaning, but he does not feel that the word adequately describes the event
and wishes it were used less frequently to describe significant
occurrences as everyday tragedies
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against
violence, repression, and racism. He has received many other prizes and
honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985 and
was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Wiesel
has published two volumes of his memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969 while
the second, titled And the Sea is Never Full, and published in 1999,
covered the years from 1969 to 1999.
Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the
Holocaust (later renamed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to
1986, spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, DC.
Wiesel is particularly fond of teaching and holds the position of Andrew
Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. From 1972 to
1976, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New
York and member of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1982 he served
as the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought
at Yale University. He also co-instructs Winter Term (January) courses at
Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. From 1997 to 1999 he was Ingeborg
Rennert Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at Barnard College of
Columbia University.
Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a
political activist, he has advocated for many causes, including Israel,
the plight of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the victims of apartheid in South
Africa, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Bosnian victims of genocide in the
former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians, and the Kurds. He recently
voiced support for intervention in Darfur, Sudan. He also led a commission
organized by the Romanian government to research and write a report,
released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in Romania and the
involvement of the Romanian wartime regime in atrocities against Jews and
other groups, including the Roma. The Romanian government accepted the
findings in the report and committed to implementing the commission's
recommendations for educating the public on the history of the Holocaust
in Romania. The commission, formally called the International Commission
for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, came to be called the Wiesel
Commission in Elie Wiesel's honor and due to his leadership.
Wiesel is the honorary chair of the Habonim Dror Camp Miriam Campership
and Building Fund, and a member of the International Council of the New
York-based Human Rights Foundation.
On March 27, 2001, Wiesel appeared at the University of Florida for Jewish
Awareness Month and was presented with an honorary doctor of humane
letters degree from the University of Florida by Dr. Charles Young.
In 2002, he inaugurated the Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighet in his
childhood home.
In early 2006, Wiesel traveled to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, a visit
which was broadcast as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show on May 24,
2006.Wiesel said that this would most likely be his last trip there.
In September 2006, he appeared before the UN Security Council with actor
George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
On April 25, 2007, Wiesel was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane
letters degree from the University of Vermont.
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