Every now and then, I feel a need to read a book about the Holocaust to remember my family and others who died needlessly in that terrible era. I quickly read this book by Elie Wiesel who is one of my personal heroes for retelling stories which cannot be explained, but need to be told. I found this book especially interesting because he used snippets of incidents, stories, and dialogues over a period of years which spanned both the war years and years afterward. Anything about the Holocaust is chilling because there is no reason why such evil happened or could not happen again. The one story that finally brought me to tears was a small retelling about Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, among religious Jews years after the war. I plan to read more of Wiesel’s works from time to time. ( )

1965

Author's attempt to understand a world that God has apparently abandoned.

additional preface added regarding the Israeli/Palestine ongoing situation (2020)