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The book that I read for this war IRP was “Night�� by Elie Wiesel. The book is a true story of Wiesel’s life in a Nazi death camp. The main characters are the boy, Elie (full name Eliezer), and his father(the book doesn’t mention the father’s name), both of them Jews. The main premise of this book is to try to escape and go home, but they can’t because the whole place is guarded up. Everyone at the camp is being fed watered down soup, bread, and coffee to keep them awake while working, and works almost every day.

My experience with the book was that I thought it was very sad. Many people died in this book, most of them innocently without doing anything wrong. Many people got hanged in front of everyone so they could all see, and most families were split apart.

***SPOILERS*** Elie and his dad weren’t the only ones being captured from their home. Because they were so poor, Elie and his family lived with other people as well, and they were all captured. Elie also had three older sisters and a mother, but when they were being deported, they split them up and all the woman in Elie’s family were killed.

I normally don’t read war books because I find them a little bit boring, but this book really pulled me in and I really liked it. Even when I was a little kid, the thought of a book about war was not something that interested me, but this book was really a good book and I might read some more like it soon.

The big idea word I chose is “change��. A lot of change has happened in this book, from being at home, to being deported, from being starved, to switching rooms, all of it has big changes. Elie talks and prays to God in the beginning, but when he sees all this change in his life, he doubts if God is even by his side through it all. His family wasn’t very religious, but he prays to help him through all of the stuff in his life. On page 62 of the book, it says, “‘Where is God now?�� And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is he? Here he is--- He is hanging here on this gallows.’�� On the next page, page 63, he also says, “‘What are you my God,�� I thought angrily, ‘compared to this afflicted crowd, proclaiming to You their faith their anger, their revolt? What does Your greatness mean, Lord of the universe, in the face of all this weakness, this decomposition, and this decay? Why do You still trouble their sick minds, their crippled bodies?’�� Many times throughout the book Elie asks this question, “Where is God now?�� saying this because he doubts God is there throughout his life when he has bad times. His father and him have been working and slaving and being starved half to death because of the war. Before they all got deported, they had to wear the yellow star, saying that you’re a Jew, but now, they are all marked Jews and are treated poorly because of it. Many people cannot handle change very well, but Elie and his dad try to handle it the best they can, but it becomes to much to bear. I think this book really has to do with change because throughout the whole book, everything is changing. On page 8, at the very start of the book, we read that, “From that moment, everything happened very quickly. The race toward death had begun.��

Thinking about this book makes me think about if I had to go through all of the stuff that Elie had to go through and why. The most important thing that I think about this book is that through it all, we have to be sure that God is with us all this time, and that even through all of the change, we need to be knowing that God can help us through anything, a test in school, or being deported to a far away place far away from home and all you love.

Its a powerful little book. Nightmarish particularly because its all true. I read it in college 20+ years ago as I was a western religions major. My takeaway from it is that human cruelty knows no bounds. And as we look at plight of innocent people around the world today - many living as scorned refugees in their own countries - it seems not that much has changed in 70 years.

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