"Night" by Elie Wiesel, Is it fiction?

The validity of the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, is questionable. Some say it is non-fiction, others historical fiction, and yet others complete fiction. I believe that this book is non-fiction, though with a few indiscretions on account of the fact that he wrote the book ten years after he experienced the events. One reason for this belief is the way Wiesel writes the book. A second is how he brings humanity into the characters in the book making them much more believable. Reason three is the way Wiesel so bluntly states the atrocities of the Nazis.

The endings of the sections and chapters of the book pull the reader in and make the story that much more believable. On page 15 he writes "An open tomb. / A hot summer sun." after he describes their houses as they leave the ghetto. "I was fifteen years old." comes after he watches a son kill his father for a scrape of bread and then be murdered himself on page 96. On page 32 Wiesel swears never to forget what happened, ever. "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never." Only a non-fiction author would think, or remember, to put that in.

Wiesel makes the characters so much more real (and they are) with the simple humanness of them. He describes how the Jews of Sighet chose to ignore Moshe the Beadle, thinking that nothing as horrendous as what de was describing could have been happening to people they had known. The prisoners do not seem to care that much when the Kapo hung a thief, but get their hearts wretched out and cry for the first time in months at the hanging of the pipel and he heard someone groan behind him: "'Where is God? Where is He? Where can he be now?' and a voice within me answered: 'Where? Here He is-He has been hanged here, on these gallows.'" He tells how his father buried the family's valuables in their cellar, and later how his father had to later tell him where they were. When the war is over he writes how none of the Jews seem to want to seek revenge, only to eat, and to go get cloths and women.

With the blunt statements about the atrocities of the Nazis the horror of the Holocaust truly begins to sink in. No normal fiction writer would have been able to make these up. An example is the way the Nazis used live babies as aerial target practice. How when Elie got off the cattle train and he thought it was snowing, but it was truly human ash. How they shot a man trying to get to some unguarded soup during a raid. How the prisoners were forced to run for miles upon miles. And how Hitler came so very close to fulfilling his promise to exterminate all the Jews in the concentration camps before he surrendered.

The book Night, by Elie Wiesel, is a work of non-fiction. This is my belief because of Weisel's style of writing, the humanity he brought to the characters, and the bluntly stated atrocities of the Nazis. No other type of author, be they historical fiction or pure fiction, "has left behind him so moving a record" -Alfred Kazin.