Elie Wiesel

when elie wiesel was liberated from buchenwald in 1945, having also been in Birkenau aushwitz, and Buna, he imposed a ten-year vow of silence upon himself before trying to describe what had happened to him and over six other Jews. When he finally broke that silence, he had trouble finding a publisher. Such depressing subject matter.

When NIGHT was finally published, over twenty-five years ago, few people wanted tp read about the holocaust, Such depressing matter.

But we cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly if it is true, and in nthe subsequent quarter century the owrld has had to hear a story it would have preffered not hear--the story of how the rest of the world, also cpmpsed of cultured people, remained silent in the fact of genocide.

night has been the most influential book in forcing that confrontation. Lean, taut, amd sparse in style, employing no trick, but providing no avenues of escape for its readers, it remains today a book we must read and reread if we are to accept resonsibility for our past and to learn from that past for the sake of our future.

Having confronted the story we would much prefer to disbelieve, treating it as the product of a diseased mind, perhaps. And there are those today who--feeding on that wish, and on the anti- Semitism that lurks near the surface of the lives of even cultured people-- are trying to persuade the world that the story is not true, urgind us to treat it as the product of diseased minds, indeed. They are committing the greatest indiginity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruiating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.

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