he dead by leaving them in silence.To refuse to speak about the horrors of the Holocaust, on the other hand, is another kind of disrespect to the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Nazi camps. Wiesel, who was among the first survivors to write about his experiences in the Holocaust, sees himself as bearing witness, giving testimony about the crimes he has seen. This testimony can bring remembrance for those who died and justice to the perpetrators. Perhaps most importantly, it preserves for future generations the memory of what happened, so that it might never happen again. Night was among the first books to record the firsthand testimony of a Holocaust survivor. It is not an attempt to analyze the whole scope of the Holocaust, but rather to give a subjective perspective on the experiences of a single victim. The book had a dramatic impact, spurring many other survivors to come forward and tell their stories, and spurring historians to begin serious study of the Nazis’ Final Solution and its disastrous impact.The everlasting pain of the Holocaust also is the reason that Night is not entirely a memoir. The mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel, to a certain extent, to distance himself from the experience, to look in from the outside. Second, Wiesel is interested not just in documenting the historical truth about physical events, but also in emotional truth. Night is the story not just of a boy who survives the concentration camps, but also of Eliezer’s emotional journey from a believing Orthodox Jewish boy to a profoundly disenchanted young man who questions both the existence of God and the humanity of man.As mentioned, Wiesel does not use a style entirely typical of a novel to tell these stories. In both Night and Dawn, he is constantly questioning, leaving the reader with many thoughts. Though a plot line is given, not everything is brought to full detail. It is nearly impossible to describe the horrors of the...
