A student gave me a copy of “Night” and it sat on my book shelf for many years. I was scared to read it. Then my niece was assigned the book for her high school English course. I pulled the book off the shelf, blew the dust off  and pealed back the cover. I wish I had jotted the student’s name in the cover.

I have to say this is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read. Right now, I am sitting in my comfy chair with a cup of coffee, knowing I could go into the cupboard and grab a snack or I could put on my warm winter coat and  walk out the door anytime I want.  But  the pages show me a sixteen-year-old kid, running twenty kilometres in freezing temperatures with only a thin musty snow-covered blanket around him, fearful that if he steps out of line an SS solider will shoot him in the back. And if he falls, he will be trampled to death. We should be so thankful for all we have.

While reading the book, it is hard to imagine how a group of people could treat others so horribly. Packing them like cattle into train cars with no room to sit, standing for hours with no food or water. The train stops. Bodies are thrown out like garbage and then the train moves on – lives forgotten. It is hard to imagine the cruelty because I have never experienced anything close to the lack of humanity carried out by the Nazis. And I wish I could say that society has learnt, but we have not. One only needs to look at the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs to realize the lessons of the holocaust are silent to some governments.

The book follows the sixteen-year-old author from his home in Sighet (a part of Hungry in 1944), to Auschwitz in Poland then to Buna also in Poland and finally to Buchenwald in Germany where he is finally liberated by the Americans. So many horrors along the way. A major take away for me is I hadn’t realized that initially the Hungarian Jews were not worried about the Nazis. In 1944, news radio kept professing that the Red Army was close at hand. No need to worry, they thought, the Russians are on the doorstep. The Germans will be defeated. It’ll be all over before we are rounded up but it was not to be.  Soon the ghettos arrived and then the trains.  Once transported these degraded humans were starved and dying and then it was too late to fight back.