Towards the end of WWII, Elie Wiesel was among the 1.3 million prisoners who suffered under the oppression of the Nazi German concentration camp in Auschwitz. When the war ended and the allies freed the survivors, 1.1 of the 1.3 million prisoners had been killed. Wiesel was one of the small percentage of prisoners who walked out alive. Although he vowed to wait 10 years before writing about the horrors of Auschwitz, he knew his story needed to be told so the world would not forget the inhumanity and suffering of his people. The banning of the book 'Night' by Elie Wiesel is a difficult pill for me to swallow. I am well aware of the fact that this memoir is detailed and descriptive. Discussing the Holocaust is not a light topic and, in my opinion, should not be taken lightly. Before we know it, the small number of Holocaust survivors will be obsolete. If we stop talking about inhumanity, if we stop reading about the Holocaust because we don't like the violence or feel the memoirs written by survivors condone violence, I feel that we are doing a great disservice to mankind. I think Wiesel said it best in his acceptance speech for the 1986 Nobel Prize. "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe." #bannedbooks2017

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