<P> Fifty years later the book had been translated into 30 languages, and now ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature . It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir . Wiesel has called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account . The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art . </P> <P> Night is the first in a trilogy--Night, Dawn, Day--marking Wiesel's transition during and after the Holocaust from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall . "In Night," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event . Everything came to an end--man, history, literature, religion, God . There was nothing left . And yet we begin again with night ." </P> <P> Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania, to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, and his wife, Sarah, née Feig . The family lived in a community of 10,000--20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews . Northern Transylvania had been annexed by Hungary in 1940, and restrictions on Jews were already in place, but the period Wiesel discusses at the beginning of the book, 1941--1943, was a relatively calm one for the Jewish population . </P> <P> That changed at midnight on Sunday, 18 March 1944, with the invasion of Hungary by Nazi Germany, and the arrival in Budapest of SS - Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann to oversee the deportation of the country's Jews . From 5 April Jews over the age of six had to wear a 10 x 10 cm (3.8 x 3.8 in) yellow badge on the upper - left side of their coats or jackets . Jews had to declare the value of their property, and were forbidden from moving home, travelling, owning cars or radios, listening to foreign radio stations, or using the telephone . Jewish authors could no longer be published, their books were removed from libraries, and Jewish civil servants, journalists and lawyers were sacked . </P>

Movie based on the book night by elie wiesel