The title here refers, not to a special night on a personal scale, but one on an eternal scale, of time and world civilisation - not an earthly night, even a polar one, of either romance or horror or anything on a human scale, but one that descended on the earth from what one can only describe as pure hell, and not accidentally either, but with every intention and design of being wrought complete annihilation of human civilisation, by those that perpetrated it.
The Long Night is about the years of WWII.
If it is extremely hard to read this book, it is only because truth stares one in face the moment one begins reading, and it is neither exaggerated nor sparing, neither overdoing any emotion nor pretending a detachment except as experienced, and the author has simply documented what he went through, events and experiences and feelings and thought. And he writes sparingly at that, obviously - the wartime years of hell he and his people went through, with whole clans wiped out and subsequently either forgotten or advised forgotten for sake of forgiveness for the perpetrators, cannot be captured except a mere glimpse of, in a book of memoirs so small and spare as this one.
Somewhere in midst of reading it one realises with a shock that one knows this particular place he mentions, or that, and one passed it while driving on a holiday, never having any idea of what went on there. Most with any idea of history of past century do know about the half a dozen or so most known concentration camps used in killing over six million Jews and several million others, at least the names, but there were dozen more if not two, three or more dozen.
It isn't that nobody else went through such tortures, humiliations, massacres. It is more that this was so deliberately intended to extinguish a whole civilisation, a section of humanity. That too isn't uncommon in history, but all the more why one recognises the whole hell. One doesn't need to compare if one knew a hell worse, one simply knows in one's heart how it is to be subjected to it, and one is able to identify with the story.
And yet, there are details unimaginable that one recoils from, with all the more horror at what the author and his people went through.
After one is finished reading the main part it is necessary to read the several appendices and understand, if one doesn't already, why it is necessary to keep this knowledge, this memory of this history, alive, and why it is a horrible idea - usually preached by all the seeming or so called liberals - to forgive and forget the perpetrators and move on. One can forgive the victims for not wanting to relive such horrors and for wanting to forget them, but that is a different story from the doctrine of forgiving all such crimes that are perpetrated with every intention of wreaking hell on the victims.
