Night by Elie Wiesel

"As a human document, Night is almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism"

                                                                                                                - A. Alvarez, Commentry

In the midst of the Second World War in 1944, Elie Wiesel and his family along with the rest of the Jews from the town of Sighet in Transylvania were forced to abandoned their homes and make a long journey to the concentration camps in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. It was while living in these concentration camps that Wiesel told his harrowing stories of surviving the Holocaust. Imagine being a witness to the death of your own family members, seeing babies thrown into the burning flames, letting people decide whether you deserve to be alive or dead and eventually losing your belief in god. 

While these are not the only horrible things that Wiesel experienced which are mentioned in the book but they are enough to give the view of how powerful this book is in its description of what happened during the holocaust from the viewpoint of the author. Perhaps the ability of this book to effectively convey the feeling of what happened during the holocaust made it into one of the most important literature on the holocaust. Furthermore, this book is only 120 pages thick. It was published more than 50 years ago and continues to be a bestselling book. In 2006, it was chosen by the Oprah's Book Club and in 2008, it was removed from the New York Times best seller list after staying there for 80 weeks.