NIGHT by Elie Wiesel

I chose to write about this book since it is my latest reading and is still very fresh in my memory. I knew it was a book about the holocaust even before I started reading it, and I had some expectations of what I was going to see there. I had known so much about the holocaust, both from common sense and from the History classes, however I was still amazed by some of the things that this book revealed to me.

It tells the story of the author who is a teenage boy at the time of the holocaust. He is one of the very few survivors of Auschwitz, one of the worst concentration camps in Germany. In it he describes not only what camp was like, life was like and how they were treated. He also describes the way this experience changes him, the way he loses faith, the way the other inmates also adapt to this drastic change, everyday fear and new conditions.

The author explains that he had written two versions of the book - one in Hebrew, 1000 pages long, and one in English, less than 100 pages long. I found it amazing how the same book could be 10 times shorter than the other. The narrative is easy to follow, catching and in the same time quite shocking.