Night

In 1941, Moishe the Beadle is deported from Sighet with the town's other foreign Jews and taken into Poland. He escapes and makes it back, and spends months telling anyone who will listen what he saw — a forest, pits, people shot, babies used as targets. Nobody in Sighet believes him. Three years later, in the spring of 1944, German forces occupy Hungary; Sighet's Jews are made to wear yellow stars and confined after a curfew, then the town is deported. Eliezer Wiesel, fifteen, goes with his father, mother, and three sisters.

At Birkenau, the family is separated soon after arrival. His mother and his youngest sister, Tzipora, go to one side and, though Eliezer doesn't yet understand it, to the gas chamber; his two older sisters are taken away from him too, and the book never follows them again. He and his father stay together through the work camp at Buna and, in January 1945, a forced march through the snow to Gleiwitz and then days in an open freight car to Buchenwald. His father dies there of dysentery and a beating, in the bunk below his son's; Eliezer hears him call his name and stays silent, afraid of being beaten if he answers. Earlier in the book, at a public hanging of a child too light for the rope to break his neck, Eliezer hears a man behind him ask where God is, and answers, silently, that God is there, hanging on the gallows.

The book is short and it does not build toward recovery — it ends a couple of weeks after the camp's liberation, with Eliezer out of a hospital bed and looking into a mirror for the first time since the ghetto, describing what looks back as a corpse. There is no account of what happens afterward. Readers expecting the ending to resolve into something bearable will not find that here.