When I bought Night, I bought it as a trilogy with two other books: Dawn and Day. I assumed it was a single account of the holocaust in three parts, the books are all very short. It turns out that each book is very different and only Night is directly about the camps.
This one is a thought experiment from Wiesel about an alternative path his life could have taken after the war and the liberation of his concentration camp. In his own words:
Suppose the American army, instead of sending me to France, had handed me a visa to the Holy Land—would I have had the courage to join one of the movements that fought for the right of the Jewish people to form an independent state in their ancestral homeland? And if so, could I have gone all the way in my commitment and killed a man, a stranger?
and not just after the camps, but what would he have done if he'd spent two or four years in the camps instead of one? Would he have become a kapo and what would he have done if he was required to strike a friend?
The novel is deeply introspective:
A man hates his enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: This fellow, my enemy, has made me capable of hate. I hate him not because he’s my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.
...Because my people have never known how to hate. Their tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate.
3 stars
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