Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown of Sighet, Romania, to his migration through multiple concentration camps. The typical parent–child relationship is inverted as his father dwindled in the camps to a helpless state while Wiesel himself became his teenaged caregiver. His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after deteriorating from dysentery and a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above him for fear of being beaten too. The memoir ends shortly after the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.
1982 Bantam Books edition, with the original 1960 English translation and cover adapted from the 1958 French edition
Sighet, Transylvania, now Sighetu Marmației, Romania, 2009
Elie Wiesel, c. 1943, aged 15
Wiesel's father, Chlomo
A memoir is any nonfiction narrative writing based on the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autobiography since the late 20th century, the genre is differentiated in form, presenting a narrowed focus, usually a particular time phase in someone's life or career. A biography or autobiography tells the story "of a life", while a memoir often tells the story of a particular career, event, or time, such as touchstone moments and turning points in the author's life. The author of a memoir may be referred to as a memoirist or a memorialist.
Title page of Henry Thoreau's memoir, Walden (1854)
An excerpt from the manuscript "Memoires on Napoleon's campaigns, experienced as a soldier of the second regiment", written by Joseph Abbeel, 1805–1815.