The tranquil town of Sighet was undisturbed by anyone, and the daily bombings of Germany and Stalingrad were merely the distant rumblings broadcasted by the London radio.

The year is 1941, and the ominous shadows of a destructive regime are advancing slowly but surely. We witness the tension between tedium and impending tragedy in the life of a twelve-year-old Jewish boy, little Elie.

Elie Wiesel's poignant and unsettling memoir of the Nazi German concentration camps is presented in the form of a coming-of-age novel, deeply intertwined with one of the most tragic events in human history, the Holocaust. The novel refuses to beat around the bush. It is powerful in its stripped, raw, and shockingly precise imagery and word choice, as well as in its slow and sudden build-ups. The brutal honesty is conveyed through the voice of a religious boy who begins to question the existence of God.

If anything, Wiesel masterfully weaves in an R-rated, nuanced message that goes beyond what world history possibly covers: where is God and how evil can humans become?

The opening chapters are slow but foreboding. As readers, we empathize with and lament the tragic fates of the boy and his family, while the subjects themselves appear tranquil and complacent. Clearly, even in their wildest imagination, they cannot envision "infants... tossed into the air and used as targets for machine guns." As readers, we anticipate the inevitable doom, but the townspeople do not. This uncomfortable dramatic irony makes Wiesel's retelling even more powerful.

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