Elie Wiesel at sixteen was a veteran of both Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It is to him that we owe the "Holocaust" metaphor, and that event and its aftermath are the theme of these novellas, first completed in French in 1961 and published in English in 1974. Not only the theme itself — which a word such as "harrowing" is wholly inadequate to describe — but the knowledge that the details are autobiographical, make it easy to forget that his trilogy is, technically, a work of fiction.