Welcome to Litsy!

The memoir is sometimes very sober and in other times very poetic.

It covers Wiesel's life from childhood to right around when he git married. He jumps back and forth quite a bit, but I didn't find it annoying... it was more like listening to somebody tell a story.

No one in Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn't know it. We didn't know that a man called Adolf Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that would crown his career; or that all the necessary means for "dealing with" us were already at hand in a place called Birkenau.

What is the difference between Jew and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?

Be careful in your relations with those in power; they draw you close or allow you to approach them only when they need you. They are your friends when your friendship is useful to them and affords them pleasure, but they forget you when you are in trouble.

I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. "I am young", he said, "and stronger than he." He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating.