Night [antikvár]

Preface for the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition by Róbert McAfee Brown When Elie Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, having alsó been in Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buna, he imposed a ten-year vow of silence upon himself before trying to describe what had happened to him and over six millión other Jews. When he finally broke that silence, he had trouble finding a publisher. Such depres-sing subject matter. When Night was finally published, over twenty-five years ago, few people wanted to read about the Holocaust. Such depressing subject matter. But we cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly if it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear—the story of how a cultured people turnéd to genocide, and how the rest of the world, alsó composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. Night has been the most influential book in forcing that confron-tation. Lean, taut, and sparse in style, employing no tricks, but providing no avenues of escape for its readers, it remains today a book we must read and reread if we are to accept responsibility for our past and to learn from that past for the sake of our future. Having confronted the story, we would much prefer to disbe-lieve, 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, urging us to treat it as the product of diseased minds, indeed. They are committing the greatest indignity humán beings can inflict on one