Originally published in Yiddish in a more expanded version under the title: Un di ṿelṭ hoṭ geshṿign.

Twenty-fifth anniversary edition has a new preface by Robert McAfee Brown. Reissue of the 1st Bantam Books edition, published in 1960; with new preface, c1986.

A true account of the author's experience as a Jewish boy with his family in a Nazi concentration camp and the evil inflicted upon them, the most awful being a deadening of feeling and sensitivity and the murder of faith in a child who had once elected to dedicate himself to the Eternal. The foreword by Mauriac reveals the events of his first interview with Wiesel and tells how his sympathies were aroused by the man's past anguish.