Yet despite all the Nazis' monstrous attempts to efface the Jewish identity, their victims's indomitable spirit could not be extinguished. The victim fell to the floor writhing, 'his face stained by the soup.' Wiesel asserted that his very existence was contingent on his next meal: 'I was nothing but a body. Wiesel recalled one inmate whose starvation drove him to approach two untended cauldrons of soup on a suicidal mission, which resulted in his being shot by a guard. Hunger was an immense force in the camps, eroding identities and sculpting them into different forms it could compel a man of principle to steal or fight, whilst thoughts of food tormented prisoners' dreams. My soul had been invaded – and devoured – by a black flame.' All that was left was a shape that resembled me. His identity was strained under such conditions: 'The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. He writes through the eyes of an adolescent plunged into an unprecedented moral hinterland, and his loss of innocence is felt keenly by the reader. Yet, at times, his descriptions are so striking as to be breathtaking in their pungent precision. Wiesel's prose is quietly measured and economical, for florid exaggeration would not befit this subject. The three 'veteran' prisoners, needles in hands, tattooed numbers on our left arms. In Night, Wiesel and the other inmates were 'told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. This was integral to the Nazis' desire to dehumanise the Jews: a number on a list carries far fewer intimate human connotations than a name. When seeking to expunge every vestige of Jewish identity from Europe, the Nazis were not content to uproot each and every Jew, rob them of their worldly possessions, shave their hair and clothe them in rags: the ultimate affront to their identity was the replacing of every prisoner's name with a number. The desolation is overwhelming.Ī person's name is subliminally bound up in the fabric of their existence: it tethers them to the past and anticipates their future remembrance. The anguish of the past is still snagged on the barbed wire, and a terrible misery stagnates over the camp, its spores infiltrating the hearts of visitors in the 21st century. The rubble of a crematorium cowers under the weight of its own atrocities, and a brittle wind scours the air. It is a scene of apocalyptic proportions: grotesque brick chimneys point their sombre fingers to the heavens, whilst all that remains of the majority of the wooden barracks are their ruined foundations. The concentration camp there shocks with its brutality and indifference to life, and to visit Auschwitz II-Birkenau – where each of the four crematoria attended to the daily slaughter of several thousand Jews – is to witness the void that remains when man abandons all morality. In May 1944, all the Jews in the area were forced into cattle wagons and transported to Auschwitz. Wiesel was a Romanian-born Jew whose home town of Sighet was occupied by the Hungarians for most of the second world war. Night, Eliezer 'Elie' Wiesel's account of his experiences as a 15 year old boy during the Holocaust, is a memoir of prodigious power: his humanity shines from every page as he bears witness to the tragedy which befell the Jewish race at the hands of the Nazis.

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