Night

Wiesel, E., (2006). Night. New York: Hill and Wang. 

A story of a Jewish teenager, Eliezer, who lives in Hungarian Transylvania.  He studies the Torah and his education is cut short when his teacher Mosche the Beadle is deported.  He returns and tells everyone about the horrid things he’d seen, noone believes him and label him insane.  At the time, 1944 the Nazis occupy Hungary and a mass amount of measures are taken against the Jews of Eliezer’s town and forced into small ghettos.  They are then deported from the ghettos into the deathcamp Auschwitz.  The book shows the truth about the death camps and how they were stripped, shaved, disinfected and treated with unimaginable cruelty.  The main character is forced to endure not only harsh treatment from the Gstapo as well as the fellow Jews who turn to self-survival mode rather than the betterment of the group.  Eliezer and his father help one another until his unfortunate death to abuse from the Gstapo until Eliezer is liberated by Americans.


This book is eye opening and scary to most. It gives a perspective not seen in textbooks. I would love to use it in a social studies classroom as a way to paint the picture of the Holocaust to the students. It's also a good way to teach historical non-fiction to students. It defines that genre.