Night

Night is a memoir, originally written in Yiddish and published in a longer version in the mid-1950s, then condensed and translated into French as La Nuit in 1958. The English translation was published in 1960 and has since been translated into more than 30 languages.

Wiesel describes his deportation from his hometown of Sighet, in what was then Hungary, to Auschwitz, where he and his father were imprisoned in the Monowitz (Buna) labor subcamp. As the Nazis retreated from the advancing Soviet army in early 1945, the prisoners were force-marched to Buchenwald, where Wiesel's father died weeks before the camp's liberation by American forces.

Wiesel was 15 years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, and he was 16 when Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945. He did not write the book until roughly a decade later, after encouragement from the French Nobel laureate François Mauriac.

Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, with the committee recognizing him as a 'messenger to mankind' for his work bearing witness to the Holocaust and fighting against indifference to human suffering. The prize honored his broader career as an author, teacher, and human rights advocate, not Night alone.