Elie Wiesel's Night broke a decade of silence

Person: Elie Wiesel
Lived: 1928–2016
Field: Writing
From: Romanian-American

The story

Elie Wiesel was 15 in May 1944 when the Jews of Sighet, a town in northern Transylvania then ruled by Hungary, were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and his younger sister, Tzipora, were murdered on arrival. He and his father survived selection for labour, were later moved to Buchenwald, and his father died there in January 1945, months before American troops liberated the camp on April 11. For ten years after the war, Wiesel would not write or speak about what he had seen.

In 1954, working as a journalist in Paris, he sought an interview with the novelist François Mauriac, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature and a devout Christian who had fought in the French Resistance. When Mauriac kept speaking of the suffering of Jesus, Wiesel told him he had seen Jewish children who suffered more and that no one spoke of them. Mauriac wept, and urged him to tell his story. The two became close friends.

Wiesel began writing on a ship to Brazil and finished a Yiddish manuscript of 862 pages. A shortened 245-page version was published in Buenos Aires in 1956 as Un di velt hot geshvign, And the World Remained Silent. He then reworked it in French. Publishers found it too bleak, until Jérôme Lindon of Les Éditions de Minuit edited it to 178 pages and published it in 1958 as La Nuit, with a preface by Mauriac. In 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published the English translation, Night.

Sales were tiny at first: about 1,000 copies in 18 months, and three years to sell a first printing of 3,000. But reviewers took notice, and its reputation grew. By 1997 it was selling 300,000 copies a year in the United States. In 2006 Oprah Winfrey chose a new translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, for her book club, and it topped the New York Times paperback non-fiction list for 18 months.

Night has been translated into 30 languages and is required reading in many schools. By 2011 it had sold six million copies in the United States, and later accounts put the figure at ten million. It is regarded as one of the cornerstones of Holocaust literature.

Why it matters

Night became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust, teaching generations of students what happened and why it must never be forgotten.