The Night Trilogy

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel first published Night in 1960. The Night Trilogy collects that work, translated by Marion Wiesel, with his two short novels on the Holocaust, Day and Dawn.

Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. It is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Wiesel writes of their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnessed each day.

In the short novel Dawn, originally published in 1961, a young man who has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine is apprenticed to a Jewish terrorist gang. Commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage, the former victim becomes an executioner.

In Day, originally published as The Accident in 1962, Wiesel again turns to fiction to question the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old? As the author writes in his introduction, "In Night it is the 'I' who speaks; in the other two [narratives], it is the 'I' who listens and questions."

As a whole, Wiesel's trilogy offers meditations on mankind's attraction to violence—as well as mankind's temptation of self-destruction.