Introduction

As a young journalist in France in 1954, Elie Wiesel was assigned to interview novelist François Mauriac, the noted Nobel Laureate. Their conversation turned to the events of the German Occupation; Mauriac told the young reporter of his wife's witnessing the train-car loads of Jewish children waiting for deportation at the station in Austerlitz. Mauriac writes in the "Forward" for Night: "And when I said, with a sigh, 'How often I've thought about those children!' [Wiesel] replied, 'I was one of them."' Mauriac convinced Wiesel to write of his experiences in the Holocaust concentration camps, in a time when few survivors were speaking or writing about their experiences.

The original draft of what would eventually become Night was more than eight hundred pages. This work in Holocaust studies is part of a history that tells of the atrocities committed against nearly...