Books like Night by Elie Wiesel (Connect : A Literature/Social Studies Program)

Written in plain language, this is the first of 21 books written by Elie Wiesel, who at 14 was removed from hid town of Sighet in Transylvania and with his entire family taken to Auschwitz, then to Buchenwald. Less than a hundred pages, it simply narrates, in first person, his history with his father from that time, through his father's death, to the arrival of the first American tanks that freed him on April, 1945.Learning what had happened to the Jewish people during WWII as a child was the first chink in the armor of my deeply-ingrained Catholic faith. Somehow before I'd turned 12, I had also learned that Pope Pius XII had done nothing to help the Jews avoid slaughter.But it was not until my own children, tri-racial, were cruelly abused, fraudulently graded, and tormented by teachers in Catholic schools through high school that I decided Christians were the least likely people on earth to follow the teachings of Christ and became first agnostic, and finally, an atheist.Reading "Night" at 62 I realize what a very slow learner I have been. I'd read Anne Frank's diary at about 12, too--and for all my years I clung to her words, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." After "Night," I'd rather have faith in canines.Stalin once said, "The death of a single person is a tragedy. The death of 40,000 is just a statistic." It's true. The 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust have been nothing more than a statistic for me, until now. "Night" has forced me to understand the brutality endured by very few--and that has been genuinely painful.Near the end, after a ten-day march in blizzard conditions and six more days in a cattle-train with no top, a hundred thin almost- corpses packed together per car, the train stopping from time to time only to throw away the dead, Elie finds himself crushing an old friend, a violin player, as Elie himself is battling to breathe with a body on top of him. Scratching and clawing until he wins and finds breath, Elie suddenly hears the strains of the violin playing Beethoven--German music forbidden to Jews. His friend plays his life out in that one piece, and dies. After half a century, I've finally cried.Every human should be required to read this book.