LA NIGHT NUTT

In 1944, as World War II neared its end, Hitler, knowing his time was short, accelerated the extermination of Jews. It was at this time that Hungarian Jews, including the Wiesel family, who had always believed that "concentration camps" were just baseless rumors, were sent to these camps.

The author witnessed the inhumane injustice and the extreme conditions where people were treated worse than insects in the concentration camps. The physical trauma simultaneously tested and destroyed the collective spirit. For survival, humanity trampled upon human ethics: "If I could rid myself of my sick father, I could fight fully for my own survival. ... I immediately felt ashamed of this." Even living lost its meaning, and everything became void: "We were no longer afraid of death. Every exploding bomb filled us with ecstasy, making us regain confidence in life." Finally, devout Jews questioned, "Where is God?"

This period of history is one of the many dark moments of persecution and massacre of other ethnic groups in human history. Wiesel, in the process of writing, refined his painful experiences into biographical literature. With the efforts of Nobel laureate François Mauriac, the memoir was finally published. It has been a bestseller for over 50 years, translated into more than 30 languages, and is hailed as a classic alongside "The Diary of Anne Frank" and Italian writer Primo Levi's memoir "If This Is a Man." It is required reading for high school and college students in the United States and other countries, and an important resource for studying Nazi Germany and World War II history.