I was given the book Night sophomore year and I never really finished it, I picked it up last week and read it. It’s a nice short read, but it’s very depressing.

It’s about a twelve year old Jewish boy that lived in Poland I think and the beginning is pretty normal life and it shows how fast everything changed. The German officers rushed into their town and put all the Jews in the ghetto, but still seeming friendly and it eventually leads to them being expelled from the city onto trains and out to Auschwitz. In the camp, he and his father get separated from the mother and his sister: which is the last time he sees his mother and sister. His dad eventually gets killed, but he somehow makes it out alive.

After the book there is a section called connections that has a bunch of poems, short stories, and things like that that show what was happening in their heads. Some of the poems don’t even talk about death, but they are the prisoners begging to be taken to God. One of the short stories talked about the author’s experience on krystalnacht (I don’t know how to spell that). It shows again how fast everything changed in one night. Some of them talk about the train rides and some talk about facing death and seeing it right before them and being split from their families. The connections was pretty much a pile up of little stories that go more in depth than that certain part did in the book. I read a little over half of them and I’m going to finish the rest tomorrow.

This book is really sad. I know there are a lot of sad ones out there, but this one really jerks at my emotions. I had relatives that¬†survived Auschwitz and I can’t even begin to imagine how scary it would have been.

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