Night by Ellie Wiesel

             

The last one … its weird that this is the last blog post I am going to be doing for this class, it went by so quickly, and I have honestly enjoyed this process more than I thought I would. So, for the last blog post of this quarter, lets talk about a really depressing, hard to get through without crying, novel!

This novel is incredibly hard to get through, while you are being taken on the journey of a character within a book we know that it is the journey of real people, of Wiesel, and of every Jewish person that was taken into the horrific world of concentration camps. The Holocaust is one of the hardest things in our human history to talk about, at least for me. Knowing the horrible, cruel, nasty and vicious things that one human could do to another has always boggled my brain. While this is something that needs to be talked about with students it can be incredibly hard to do so, when some of the things that Wiesel writes about are not things that I have personally worked through yet or learned how to talk about. I am not sure how you would have a conversation with kids in middle school about how Nazi’s would burn babies by the truckload, or how they could experiment on people, kill them in gas chambers by the dozens, or just expose them to the obscene amounts of torture, humiliation, and degradation that these poor Jewish people had to go through. While there are going to be so many difficult things that will need to be addressed in the classroom while reading this book or any other Holocaust text, it is 100% something that needs to be talked about, in a safe, inclusive environment, for students to learn what happened, how we got to that place in our history, and how we have tried to recover. There are hardly any Holocaust survivors that are still alive today, around 100,000 in 2016 from a Time article talking about the life of our author, Ellie Wiesel died at 87 and “brought voice to the millions of people silenced in the Holocaust and served as an advocate for peace to make sure the horrors of the past did not repeat itself.” – Time (Melissa Chan)

In a few years there will be no person alive in the world that lived through the Holocaust, not a single person that can recount what happened, or tell their courageous story of survival and perseverance. Books like Night, and authors like Wiesel are vital to the continuation of education that our students are going to need when it comes to some of our worlds darkest moments. We need people to write about what happened, to forever preserve in time the artifacts of their life, our history and the world we once lived in.