Night

Night is a book on the life of one individuals encounters in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Although the content in this book can be quite graphic, I think that it is a good read for students who are learning about the Holocaust. When learning about it in school it is next to impossible to really understand or comprehend such evil and cruelty- this book allows students to know more about what people had to go through when in concentration camps. Because of the content I would probably recommend this book for 10-12th graders. The Holocaust is such a huge thing to wrap your head around so I think that the older they are, the easier it would be for them to really get the severity of what happened.

It was really hard for me to get through this book. The writing was done very well and the story was interesting but the situations that he had to go through and the different stories that he shared really got to me and made it hard to read. The scene that was most disturbing to me was when they were first brought to the concentration camp and the babies were being thrown into a pit. It is so hard for me to imagine such cruelty and I really had a hard time with that.

Something that I noticed with this book and with Kindred, is how easy it was for the main characters to get into the roles that were expected of them. For Dana, she knew that slavery was wrong and she despised it, but at the same time it scared her how quickly she fell into the roles given to her; similarly, Eli found himself becoming less and less "human" going further and further into survivor mode and becoming less disturbed by the things that were happening around him.

I would definitely teach this book in a class room. It isn't terribly long, with simple language- the content is also very interesting so I think that this would reach a wide range of readers. Like I said, I would teach it to 10-12th graders. I would also maybe pair this book with a movie on the Holocaust or have our next book be Number the Stars or something, just to give the students more of a perspective on the matter.

So sad that this is part of our history but I am glad that he turned his experience into literature so that we can better understand what happened and like he said prevent history from repeating itself.