Elie Wiesel: A Memory of the Man
I read Wiesel's "Night" in high school. It was a total gut punch to my young mind. I was a morbid little shit then; and by that time had watched countless footage, and read endless books on genocide, crime, serial killers, and satanism(which was big in the 80s for some gawdawful reason. I blame post 70s coke orgies/baby boomer guilt. God is coming for you, you filthy hippies, and Satan is going to eat your children. Or some such nonsense like that.) But Wiesel humanized the bulldozed piles of bodies, and the beady-eyed shrunken skulls peering from filthy barracks. These were people. People that had been hounded from their homes, stripped of their possessions and protections by the law, and eventually railroaded to their deaths. Each had their soul exploded by hopelessness, their humanity stripped from them by a dead-eyed bureaucracy. Sweet little Anne Frank shared the innocence of childhood, and the fears of hiding on the good graces of friends and ex-employees. Wiese...