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''Night'' (1960) is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–45, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In ''Night'' everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends," a Kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."〔Elie Wiesel, ''Night'', Bantam Books, 1982, pp. 101, 105; Ellen S. Fine, ''Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel'', State University of New York Press, 1982, p. 7.〕 Wiesel was 16 when Buchenwald was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above for fear of being beaten too. He moved to Paris after the war, and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page ''Un di velt hot geshvign'' ("And the World Remained Silent").〔Wiesel 2010 (), p. 319; Ruth Franklin, ''A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction'', Oxford University Press, 2011, p. (73 ).〕 The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as ''La Nuit'' in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation as ''Night''. Fifty years later the book had been translated into 30 languages, and now ranks as one of the bedrocks of . It remains unclear how much of ''Night'' is memoir. Wiesel has called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art.〔Ruth Franklin, ("A Thousand Darknesses" ), ''The New Republic'', 23 March 2006; ("Elie Wiesel" ), ''Academy of Achievement'', 29 June 1996.〕 ''Night'' is the first in a trilogy – ''Night'', ''Dawn'', ''Day'' – marking Wiesel's transition during and after the Holocaust from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. "In ''Night''," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end – man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."〔Sanford V. Sternlicht, ''Student Companion to Elie Wiesel'', Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003, p. (29 ); for the quote, Morton A. Reichek, "Elie Wiesel: Out of the Night," ''Present Tense'', Spring 1976, p. 46, cited in Fine 1982.〕 ==Background== Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania, to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, and his wife, Sarah, née Feig. The family lived in a community of 10,000–20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Northern Transylvania had been annexed by Hungary in 1940, and restrictions on Jews were already in place, but the period Wiesel discusses at the beginning of the book, 1941–1943, was a relatively calm one for the Jewish population.〔Fine 1982, p. 13.〕 That changed at midnight on Sunday, 18 March 1944, with the invasion of Hungary by Nazi Germany, and the arrival in Budapest of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann to oversee the deportation of the country's Jews. From 5 April Jews over the age of six had to wear a 3.8 x 3.8 inch (10 x 10 cm) yellow badge on the upper left side of their coats or jackets.〔Randolph Braham, ''The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary'', Wayne State University Press, 2000 (), p. 102.〕 Jews had to declare the value of their property, and were forbidden from moving home, travelling, owning cars or radios, listening to foreign radio stations, or using the telephone. Jewish authors could no longer be published, their books were removed from libraries, and Jewish civil servants, journalists and lawyers were sacked.〔Braham 2000, p. 101.〕 As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe, the mass deportations began at a rate of four trains a day from Hungary to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, each train carrying around 3,000 people.〔Braham 2000, p. 135.〕 Between 15 May and 8 July 1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews are recorded as having been sent there on 147 trains, most gassed on arrival. The transports comprised most of the Jewish population outside Budapest, the Hungarian capital.〔Michael Berenbaum, "Foreword," in Randolph L. Braham, Scott Miller (eds.), ''The Nazis' Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary'', Wayne State University Press, 2002, p. 9.〕 Between 16 May and 27 June, 131,641 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania.〔("Transylvania" ), Yad Vashem.〕 Wiesel, his parents and sisters – older sisters Hilda and Beatrice and seven-year-old Tzipora – were among them. On arrival Jews were "selected" for the gas chamber or forced labour; to be sent to the left meant work, to the right, the gas chamber.〔("The Auschwitz Album" ), ''Yad Vashem''.〕 Sarah and Tzipora were sent to the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the rest of the family. Wiesel and Chlomo managed to stay together, surviving forced labour and a death march to another concentration camp, Buchenwald, near Weimar in Germany. Chlomo died there in January 1945, three months before the 6th Armored Division of the United States Army arrived to liberate the camp.〔Fine 1982, p. 5.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Night (book)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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