Night

The day before I started reading this, a video went viral showing a sinkhole open up in a hotel pool in Israel. One person was sucked inside and died while others barely escaped. If you looked at the tweets about the video, most of them celebrated that a Jewish person had been killed or were disappointed that only one person died. It was a good reminder that, though it's not as obvious right now, hating Jewish people and wanting them dead never really went out of style.

And that's why Elie Wiesel's memoir is so important. The book chronicles his experience as a teenager during the Holocaust, where he and all the Jews in Transylvania were sent to ghettos, then shipped in cattle cars to concentration camps. Most of the book details he and his father's attempts to stay alive, trying to avoid “selection” that would send them to the crematorium.

The book details unimaginable horrors, but perhaps the scariest thing of all is that as time goes by, Wiesel gets desensitized to it. After seeing so much horror and misery, he becomes numb, as does the reader of his story.

It's easy to become numb to the brokenness, hatred, and evil in our world. When the concentration camps were liberated, people started using the slogan “never again” as a rallying cry and an admonition to the rest of the world. But such a promise means remembering and recognizing the horrors of the Holocaust. “Night” is one important document to help with that task.