Probably the best-known Holocaust memoir, this 1960 account of the author’s time in two concentration camps is raw and terrifying. In 1944, Wiesel and his father are deported from their village in Transylvania to Auschwitz. What follows is the destruction of all human values and the death of God. The young boy watches his father grow weak and ill. He grows to resent his father’s presence, even considers him “dead weight,” because in the camps there is no family and no wisdom or meaning—only a battle to survive, complicated by a poorly understood teenage impulse to judge and resent. That Wiesel managed to put all this down on paper is incredible. The book is a triumph of human faith. Reviewed on March 17, 2022