As a student who is passionate about fostering a society full of bright, well informed, well educated people, I strongly encourage you to keep “Night” by Ellie Wiesel on the book list. As my father often tells me “We learn history so that we don’t make the same mistakes again.” While reading the article “I Remember Night: Remembering Ellie Wiesel” I noticed that the writer Wamaryia was empowered to teach and speak to other people about her own experiences going through a genocide. With so much racism, bullying, and fighting in our school, I believe that teaching kids about difficult topics such as genocide will help to abolish negative behavior.

The only way to get kids to take history seriously is to teach them how hate takes over quickly if it isn’t prevented in the first place. I know this because history is a repetitive cycle, and genocide has happened in many places since the Holocaust such as “Cambodia, Bosnia, Sudan, Syria, and more in other places” (Par. 4) Wamaryia, a young, immigrant, writer also experienced a genocide when she was in the 8th grade, and even though my fellow student and I have not been in a genocide we still live in a place where there are hate crimes and people don’t have the same rights just because of their sexuality or race. Similarly, what is happening in America is not that different from what happened when the Holocaust started in that several tyrannical rulers started slowly taking away certain people's freedoms and rights whilst infiltrating communities with followers designed to spread false ideas, propaganda, and religiously based hate. The genocide in Rwanda started only “50 years after the holocaust ended.” (Par. 2) Which shows that the Holocaust was not a watershed, but in fact the start of an era filled with hate.

The reason it is so lucrative that teens keep reading books like “Night” is so that we can speak up and find a voice like Wamaryia “If Ellie Wiesel could write about it, I could speak up too.” (Par. 6) We too can learn from “Night” and prevent hate from prevailing in our schools and community. “Night” teaches us the important lesson of how “Hate can slowly take over a society.” (Par. 3) In many cases the origin of hate is the indoctrination of youth. As we have learned from “Night”, the children in the Hitler Youth Program were taught to hate anything different from a young age, but when we read “Night” we learn this and can each play a small role in stopping hate and genocide in it’s tracks.

Accordingly, the way to foster love is knowledge because the more we know, the more our empathy grows. “Night” teaches us how “hate can slowly take over a society” (Par. 3) I strongly urge you to dismember any attempts to take “Night” off the reading list. If more students could read “Night” and consequently gain a powerful voice like Wamaryias, the results would be incredibly pervasive. Reading narrative literature such as “Night” will allow people to learn from history and not repeat it.