Halamahalaaa

NIGHT
By Elie Wiesel Winner of the 1986 Noble Prize

Foreword by Francois Mauriac Foreign journalists often come to see me. I dread their visits, being torn between a desire to reveal everything in my mind and a fear of putting weapons into the hands of an interviewer when I know nothing about his own attitude toward France. I am always careful during encounters of this kind. That morning, the young Jew who came to interview me for a Tel Aviv paper immediately won my sympathy, and our conversation very quickly took a personal turn. It led me to recall memories of the Occupation. It is not always the events we have been directly involved in that affect us the most. I confided to my young visitor that nothing I had an during those somber years had left so deep a mark upon me a those trainloads of Jewish children standing at Austerlitz station. Yet I did not even see them myself! My wife described them to me, her voice still filled with horror. At that time we knew nothing of Nazi methods of extermination. And who could have imagined them! Yet the way these lambs had been torn from their mothers in itself exceeded anything we had so far thought possible. I believe that on that day I

touched for the first time upon the mystery of iniquity whole revelation was to mark the end one era and the beginning of another. The dream which Western man conceived in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he saw in 1789, and which, until August 2, 1914, had grown stronger with the progress of enlightenment and the discoveries of science--this dream vanished finally for me before those trainloads of little children. And yet I was still thousands of miles away from thinking that they were to be fuel for the gas chamber and the crematory. This, then, was what I had to tell the young journalist. And when I said, with a sigh, "How often I've thought about those children!" he replied, "I was one of them." He was one of them. He had seen his mother, a beloved little sister, ad