The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. He moved to Paris after the war and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent"). Wiesel was 16 when Buchenwald was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above for fear of being beaten too. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."
"Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends", a kapo tells him. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight . Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship as his father deteriorates to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful, teenage caregiver. 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. New York: Hill & Wang/Oprah Book Club, 2006.) New York: Hill & Wang London: MacGibbon & Kee, 116 pages.Ġ-8090-7350-1 (Stella Rodway translation.