Elie Wiesel, from the Preface of the last translation of the book Night. I remember that night, the most horrendous in my life:

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1 Elie Wiesel, from the Preface of the last translation of the book Night I remember that night, the most horrendous in my life:..eliezer, my son, come here.i want to tell you something O n l y to y o u Come, don t leave me alone Eliezer. I heard his voice, grasped the meaning of his words and the tragic dimension of the moment, yet I did not move. It had been his last wish to have me next to him in his agony, at the moment when his soul was tearing itself from his lacerated body yet I did not let him have his wish. I was afraid. Afraid of the blows. That was why I remained deaf to his cries. Instead of sacrificing my miserable life and rushing to his side, taking his hand, reassuring him, showing him that we was not abandoned, that I was near him, that I felt his sorrow, instead of all that, I remained flat on my back, asking God to make my father stop calling my name, to make him stop crying. So afraid was I to incur the wrath of the SS. In fact, my father was no longer conscious. Yet his plaintive, harrowing voice went on piercing the silence and calling me, nobody but me.

2 Well? The SS had flown into a rage and was striking my father on the head. Be quiet, old man! Be quiet! My father no longer felt the club s blows; I did. And yet I did not react. I let the SS beat my father, I left him alone in the clutches of death. Worse : I was angry with him for having been noisy, for having cried, for provoking he wrath of the SS. Eliezer! Eliezer! Come, don t leave me a l o n e His voice had reached me from so far away, from so close. But I had not moved. I shall never forgive myself. Nor shall I ever forgive the world for having pushed me against the wall, for having turned me into a stranger, for having awakened in me the basest, most primitive instincts. His last word had been my name. A summons. And I had not responded.

3 Primo Levi, from the book If this is a Man, chapter Our Nights So our nights drag on. The dream of Tantalus and the dream of the story are woven into a texture of more indistinct images: the suffering of the day, composed of hunger, blows, cold, exhaustion, fear and promiscuity, turns at night time into shapeless nightmares of unheard of violence, which in free life would only occur during a fever. One wakes up at every moment, frozen with terror, shaking in every limb, under the impression of an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood. The procession to the bucket and the thud of bare heels on the wooden floor turns into another symbolic procession: it is us again, grey and identical, small as ants, yet so huge as to reach up to the stars, bound one against the other, countless, covering the plain as far as the horizon ; sometimes melting into a single substance, a sorrowful turmoil in which we all feel ourselves trapped and suffocated ; sometimes marching in a circle, without beginning or end, with a blinding giddiness and a sea of nausea rising from the praecordia to the gullet ; until hunger or cold or the fullness of our bladders turn our dreams into their customary forms. We try in vain, when the nightmare itself or the discomforts wake us, to extricate the various elements and drive them back, separately, out of the field of our present attention, so as to defend our sleep from their intrusion : but as soon as we close our eyes, once again we feel our brain start up, beyond our control ; it knocks and hums, incapable of rest, it fabricates phantasms and terrible

4 symbols, and without rest projects and shapes their images, as a grey fog, on to the screen of our dreams. Primo Levi, Prayer, Shema You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, Hot food and friendly faces : Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud, Who knows no peace, Who fights for a scrap of bread, Who dies by a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, Without hair and without name, Without the strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold, Like a frog in the winter. Meditate that this came about : I commend these words to you. Carve them in your hearts At home, in the streets, Going to bed, rising : Repeat them to your children

5 Elie Wiesel s acceptance speech, Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony, 1986 There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, A Martin Luther King Jr. one person of integrity each one of us can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know is that they are not alone ; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

IF IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one book, this would

Preface to the New Translation by Elie Wiesel IF IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night, including those