EVEN LESS UNDERSTANDABLE than my never having read Passing before is my never having read this before. A long-time high school staple in a lot of places, even in Nebraska.
As I imagine anyone likely to wander into this blog already knows, Night is a Holocaust memoir. Wiesel was fifteen and living with his family in Sighet, in what is now Romania, when they and the other Jews of the town were rounded up by the Nazis in the spring of 1944. Upon their arrival at Auschwitz, he and his father were separated from his mother and sister, whom they never saw again. As they were capable of labor, Wiesel and his father were not immediately killed. They managed to survive in the camp, and even survived a brutal transfer to Buchenwald after the Russians reached Auschwitz. His father dies just shortly before the camp is liberated by U.S. soldiers.
It's a terrifying story. To use the terms Giorgio Agamben has made famous, the camp is designed to systematically dismantle and strip away the prisoners' bios, "life" understood as having dignity, rights, and value, leaving them with just zoë or "bare life," mere natural functioning without a claim to anything, "unaccommodated man" as Lear says on the heath.
How much "humanity" can be taken away from someone before they are no longer "human" even in their own eyes? That's one way of saying what this short book is about. That anyone who survived the camps went on to have any kind of productive life whatsoever, as so many did and as Wiesel himself so abundantly did, inspires hope.
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