i have lived a thousand years fiction or nonfiction

The night before authorities transport him to a labor camp, he studies the Talmud with Bubi and tells him to remember these passages when he thinks of his father in the future. After Markus’ business is shut down, he finds comfort reading the Talmud. Throughout the book, Britton-Jackson, her family, and her fellow Jewish inmates find solace in their faith and strive to observe its laws. Sharing the fate of the Jewish people in the ghetto changes this, and she feels “happy to share this peculiar condition of Jewishness” (41). And that’s all I really need from a nonfiction book like this.Prior to her experience in the ghetto, Bitton-Jackson says she had not considered whether she was proud to be Jewish. You get the sense of time passing, with every day being it’s own battle. You get that desperate sense of needing to survive. How such a short book can encompass so much blows my mind.

We can remember them, and learn from them, and do our best to not let it happen again. But we can read books like this, and do our best to keep their stories alive. We’ll never know what it’s like to live in a world of war, with entire races being wiped out at extraordinary speeds for seemingly no reason other than racist hatred. We’ll never know that level of fear, hunger, distrust, confusion. We’ll have learned nothing.Įlie Wiesel explains how it is perfectly – how we, as readers living in this day and age – can never know what it was like. And if we forget about it, it’s likely to happen again. It tells such a devastating story, but it’s one we have to understand. There’s a reason why so many people say this is a must read for everybody. And yet we must believe it, because this is our past. How those atrocities actually end up being truth, is even more unbelievable. How one little book can contain such atrocities, I don’t know.

A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor’s perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. I wanted a really quick one evening, and since this was the shortest book on my shelves at that point, I picked it up.īorn into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I finally read the nonfiction book that has been on my radar for years.

I have lived a thousand years fiction or nonfiction