"The night was long, long to no end. "

Eliezer Wiesel lives in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania, in a family of four children. He has three sisters, Hilda, the eldest, Bea, the youngest, and Judith, the youngest. It is the third and only son. His father and mother are highly valued by people the local Jewish community. In late 1941, the boy was almost thirteen. It is a studious child and "deeply religious". By day he studied the Talmud and night, he went to the synagogue to pray. He met in this regard Moshe the Beadle, a master of the art of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, with whom he reads and rereads the pages of the Zohar. Life unfolds unhindered and years pass and Sighet, the rhythm of the long nights of study and prayer among coreligionists to date from 1942 when the city authorities were ordered to expel the Jews foreigners. The Hungarian police cram therefore in cattle cars to take them far away, to unknown horizons. Moshe the Beadle is one of them and is part of the convoy: "The deportees were quickly forgotten. A few days after their departure, they said they were in Galicia, where they worked, they were very satisfied with their lot. "

The ordinary daily quickly reasserts itself immediately after this episode. The tragedy of the warlike conditions plaguing the world seems so far not reach the population of Sighet despite the testimony of Moshe the Beadle who was able to return to this strange destination, this "Galicia" remote. Nobody sticks to his speech when he tells: "The Jews had to wait and board the trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. We let them down. They were made to dig large pits. When they had finished their work, the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion, without haste, they pulled down their prisoners. Everyone had to get close to the hole and present his neck. Babies were thrown into the air and machine guns took them for targets. It was in the forest of Galicia, near Kolomaye ... "Moshe the Beadle says will be released by a miracle. But most people remain skeptical of Sighet.

Yet during the spring of 1944, this account will be confirmed by the entry of the German Army in the city: "Anguish. German soldiers - with their steel helmets and their emblem, a death skull. "Two will be created ghettos in Sighet. Some time later, Eliezer and his family will be forced, on pain of being shot on the spot, to ride in a convoy of cattle cars to Auschwitz: "The world was a sealed wagon. "

This autobiographical story of Eliezer Wiesel realizes with great realism of the child's daily and adolescent he was in the context of the policy of the Nazi regime, both before and during the test of inhumane concentration camps. The author sticks to the facts and only the facts. Each event, each portrait is transcribed through the internal focus, in this case that of a young Jewish teenager who discovers with amazement the terrible business of mass destruction and thought given by the German Army during the second conflict world, "a world where cold and denies it was human to be inhuman, where men in uniform were disciplined and educated to kill," he writes in his preface. Throughout, the reader remains also summoned as a witness to all the crimes committed by the Nazis. The work gives to see among others the reification of man, by the barbarous treatment that the deportees suffer. - Starting with the loss of identity ("I became A-7713 I no longer had any other name . "), insensitivity crazy torturers, like Dr. Mengele that works to select the prisoners (" Three SS officers surrounded the notorious Dr. Mengele, who had received us at Birkenau [...] the Dr. Mengele was holding a list in hand: our numbers He signed to the block leader. "! We can start" As if it were a game ... "), and the report of the individual to death, loneliness and body ("The bread, soup - it was my life I was a body Maybe even less: a hungry stomach stomach alone felt... time passing. ")

Elie Wiesel is one of the few survivors of the death camps. He left Buchenwald in spring 1945, released by the US Army. His parents and sisters never returned.