Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dawn
    Dawn
    Dawn
    Audiobook3 hours

    Dawn

    Written by Elie Wiesel

    Narrated by George Guidall

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    With the coming of dawn is the coming of death for a captured English officer in British-controlled Palestine. Elisha, a young Israeli freedom fighter, is his executioner. Ordered to kill the officer in reprisal for Britain's execution of a Jewish prisoner, Elisha thinks about his past-a sorrowful memory of the nightmare of Nazi death camps. As the only surviving member of his family, he dreamt of a wonderful future in his promised homeland. But instead, he finds himself closer to committing heartless murder with the approach of daylight. Dawn presents a haunting glimpse into the soul of one man and a budding nation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 6, 2008
    ISBN9781440782152
    Dawn
    Author

    Elie Wiesel

    Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in the town of Sighet, now part of Romania. During World War II, he, with his family and other Jews from the area, were deported to the German concentration camps, where his parents and younger sister perished. Wiesel and his two older sisters survived. Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 by advancing Allied troops, he was taken to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist. In 1958, he published his first book, La Nuit, a memoir of his experiences in the concentration camps. He has since authored nearly thirty books, some of which use these events as their basic material. In his many lectures, Wiesel has concerned himself with the situation of the Jews and other groups who have suffered persecution and death because of their religion, race or national origin. He has been outspoken on the plight of Soviet Jewry, on Ethiopian Jewry and on behalf of the State of Israel today. Wiesel made his home in New York City, and became a United States citizen. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University, a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City College of New York, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University where he taught 'Literature of Memory.' Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980 - 1986, Wiesel served on numerous boards of trustees and advisors. He died in 2016.

    More audiobooks from Elie Wiesel

    Related to Dawn

    Related audiobooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Left Abandoned Me

      Oct 12, 2023

      The Left Abandoned Me
      6 min read

    • Article

      To Be In A State Of War

      Jul 6, 2023

      To Be In A State Of War
      15 min read

    • Article

      I Want a Reckoning

      Oct 9, 2018

      I Want a Reckoning
      8 min read

    • Article

      'The Pursuit Of William Abbey' Travels A Twisty Path

      Nov 17, 2019

      Claire North's new book starts with a doctor witnessing an atrocity in Africa in 1884, but becomes a spy thriller, a horror story, a supernatural mystery and an indictment of capitalism and empire.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letter to My Son

      Jul 4, 2015

      Letter to My Son
      30 min read

    • Article

      Leonard Pitts Jr.: We Owe Them Much Better Than This

      Nov 30, 2022

      Joe Engel died last week. It’s unlikely you will know the name, especially if you don’t live in Charleston, South Carolina, his hometown since 1949. Joe never wrote a great novel or made a scientific breakthrough. His accomplishment was less gaudy, y

      2 min read

    • Article

      Killing Time

      May 8, 2019

      Killing Time
      4 min read

    • Article

      Surviving The Straits Of Hell

      Dec 23, 2020

      NINETY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MOSHE HA-ELION proudly ushers me forward to admire the view from his smart fourteenth-floor apartment overlooking the beach in Bat Yam, south of Jaffa. It is late January and the mist is rising over the Mediterranean as if shield

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Happiest Man On Earth

      Nov 5, 2020

      We were a big loving family. I was born in 1920 in Leipzig, Germany. My father, Isidore, and mum, Lina, had me soon after they married, followed by my sister, Johanna – Henni for short. Proud of our country, we considered ourselves German first, and

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Conflict With No End

      May 24, 2021

      The Conflict With No End
      4 min read

    • Article

      Foreign Body Ear

      Aug 1, 2017

      Foreign Body Ear
      6 min read

    • Article

      Grief Is Another Word For Love

      Jun 21, 2021

      I am trapped in Australia. The borders are shut, which has worked well for keeping COVID-19 out, but it has also kept me in. Over the last fifteen months in sunny Perth, where I live, there have only been two cases of COVID-19 in the community. We ha

      8 min read

    • Article

      The After

      Jun 10, 2023

      He is sitting opposite me, staring blankly like a dead fish. Stone eyes. Cobalt and lifeless. Pale gray skin, dripping scales. I imagine him hauled out of the water and dumped on the riverbank, gasping for breath. Just as he deserves. I only agreed t

      13 min read

    • Article

      I, Ghost

      Jan 16, 2024

      I, Ghost
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Doctor Is In

      Jul 30, 2019

      The Doctor Is In
      3 min read

    • Article

      Metta For My Abuser

      Jun 7, 2022

      Metta For My Abuser
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Book for the Moment: On Helen Weinzweig’s ‘Basic Black with Pearls’

      Jun 1, 2018

      This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 1. In our current moment, a chorus of “nasty women” has flooded social media with grievances. Unfortu

      5 min read

    • Article

      Ben Okri

      Apr 25, 2022

      Ben Okri
      5 min read

    • Article

      Grandeur Of The Unimportant

      Jul 1, 2018

      APZ Books The reasons a contemporary American poet might consider writing political poetry these days are too many to name. I would include the government’s attempt to silence dissent in the media, in the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA

      13 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dawn

    4/5

    347 ratings21 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Eindrücklich und tiefgreifend, ergreifend und tiefgründig. Elie Wiesel verarbeitet seine Eindrücke des Holocausts und der Zeit danach. Hoffentlich bleiben uns diese Texte noch lange erhält.
    • 4/5
      Heads up this is not a continuation of Night, in fact the stories are very different and not at same time. This was a very powerful novela. A bit hard to understand at times. I would recommend it to a few selected readers not for everyone
    • 5/5
      This small, slender volume was a pretty weird read. It's the story of two young men, one of whom will kill the other at dawn.

      The narrator of the story is the assassin. In his mind, he reviews the story of his life, and what has brought him to this point, where he will kill another human being, face-to-face, in retaliation for the execution of one of his comrades in what he calls, "The Movement."

      The story takes place in Palestine before it became the state of Israel (before 1948). After the decimation of World War II, there were many Jews who felt (justifiably) that the world had turned its back on them while they suffered and died, and so they decided to create their own nation-state in the land of Palestine, their historical homeland. However, Palestine is in a hotly contested part of the world, which is occupied at the time of the story by the British. Some Jews, some of them Zionists, are carrying out acts of terrorism against the occupying British army and government. One of them has been arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for carrying out one of these acts. In retaliation, the narrator's group of fighters has kidnapped a British soldier and is holding him hostage, to be killed at the same time as their comrade is executed.

      That's the setup of the plot. The story is about what transpires in the narrator's mind and over the course of the evening before he's to kill the British soldier, and that's where it gets weird. He feels the weight of his dead relatives who didn't survive the war or the concentration camps, and their ghosts gather around him and talk to him, impressing upon him the importance of carrying out his duty. At times it's hard to tell whether he's dealing with reality, or he's living in that world of the past, with those beloved dead.

      This is not an easy book to read, but it's definitely worthwhile reading the trilogy if you chance upon it. The first book in the trilogy is "Night," followed by "Dawn," and finally, "The Accident." I think I'm going to have to do a little "light" reading in between "Dawn" and "The Accident," because this one was a challenge, and very emotional.
    • 3/5
      Justice and revenge waltz in geometric confusion. This was encountered in the high tide of my Holocaust reading. The applications to our present reality were unrealized at the time.
    • 2/5
      Set after WWII, Elisha had been in a concentration camp, but when he got out, he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He was then recruited into a terrorist group in Israel. At 18 years old, Elisha is told he is to murder a kidnapped English soldier. The (very short) book (in the intro, Wiesel calls it a novel, but it’s under 100 pages) is the day or two leading up to the murder, as Elisha is coming to terms with what he has been tasked to do. Boring. The premise doesn’t sound too bad, but ultimately, it was mostly Elisha discussing philosophy with his fellow terrorists. It is billed as book 2 after “Night”, but it was fiction whereas Night was a memoir. I won’t be reading the 3rd book.
    • 3/5
      A story of extreme moral complexity. However, I do not think this is one of Wiesel's better books. I did not care for many of the metaphors.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book. I loved the (subtle) symbolism that Dawn had for the book. I also loved how, as it should be and often is with short books, there was one central theme that permeated throughout. It was great to stay focused on one thing and one thing only, with other details added in, for 81 pages.
    • 3/5
      Amazon's Description: Elisha is a young Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, and an Israeli freedom fighter in British-controlled Palestine; John Dawson is the captured English officer he will murder at dawn in retribution for the British execution of a fellow freedom fighter. The night-long wait for morning and death provides Dawn, Elie Wiesel’s ever more timely novel, with its harrowingly taut, hour-by-hour narrative. Caught between the manifold horrors of the past and the troubling dilemmas of the present, Elisha wrestles with guilt, ghosts, and ultimately God as he waits for the appointed hour and his act of assassination. Dawn is an eloquent meditation on the compromises, justifications, and sacrifices that human beings make when they murder other human beings.

      The book is almost exclusively the thoughts and feelings of Elisha during one long night. In the end, this didn't have the immense impact on me as Wiesel's horrific "Night."
    • 4/5
      Thought provoking, interesting, sad...
    • 4/5
      You could tell Wiesel was definitely the author of this work, it didn't strike me with the raw emotions Night had. I know the content was completely different, but I couldn't connect with the characters in the same way. It was still well written and I'm glad I read it. Would read again. 4 out of 5 stars.
    • 4/5
      It wasn't quite like Night. It was more like a short story than a novel. I wanted to know more about both David ben Moshe and John Dawson. I think the characters backgrounds could have been developed more. Still, Weisel as always points out the reality of human nature and makes us all question ourselves.
    • 5/5
      A riveting story told by a survivor of a concentration camp who struggles with his conscience as he is called on to be an executioner.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of just one night, the night that a young man contemplates his task at dawn: killing a British soldier in retaliation for the death of an Israeli terrorist on the same morning. He thinks deeply on how his past brought him here and how this act will affect him in the future. A gripping and thoughtful book.
    • 4/5
      Very well written...almost Dostoevskian, with a similar sort of religious existentialism. Wiesel makes the best argument I've ever heard for the so-called "cycle of violence"---but unfortunately, it's equivocal. The plot involves a distinction between cold-blooded acts of violence and those committed in the heat of the moment, but the theme depends on ignoring not only this distinction but any distinctions among any uses of force whatsoever (most significantly between an aggressor's initiation of force and the victim's retaliatory use of force in self-defense).
    • 4/5
      "Night", being a memoir, and "Dawn", being a novel, are profoundly different books; although, tied together by the Holocaust (a catastrophe that the young Eliezer lives through in "Night", and that haunts Elisha in "Day"). This point being made, I will admit that I still enjoy "Night" (and also "Day") more than "Dawn"; however, I do feel that if one is going to read "Dawn" that they should begin the book with the understanding that it is going to be different from "Night", and to approach this work as such.I admire "Dawn" for its writing style, and the philosophical issues that Wiesel examines through Elisha. The aesthetics of style reminded me of a those books that have been written in the post-Kafka tradition (Judaic overtones, the nature of the absurd, and a nightmare-like quality). The issues of evil, death, and aftermath are poignant and haunting. Through the implied death of David ben Moshe and actual execution of the British Colonel we see the spiritual demise of Elisha - and the absurd nature of differences (are we so very different or are we the same?).
    • 5/5
      I mooched this for a friend and thought I would read it before sending it to her. This is a story of a moral dilemma. Elisha is a young Jewish man whose family all died in the concentration camps and who has joined the resistance against the British in Palestine. One of his comrades is to be executed by the British and he is charged with killing a captured British officer in reprisal. The story deals with his conscience and attempts to rationalise taking the life of this British officer with whom he might be friendly in other circumstances. A short, quite stark but gripping read.
    • 5/5
      A graceful and emotionally profound extension of Night. In postwar Palestine, Wiesel leads us through one long night, painful and harrowing to read, to the dawn - a watershed in Wiesel's life, with a sense of irreversible change, and that this represents his final shift from adolescence to adulthood. His prose is beautiful, and suffused with a sense of drama. This is a short read, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a quick one to read on the bus to work.
    • 4/5
      I've never read any of Mr. Wiesel's works before, though I've read many Holocaust and post-Holocaust works. Maybe it's my growing age, but I find myself trying to imagine facing the horrors of Jews in WW II and failing. I can't even attempt to imagine what I would have done anymore. I wonder, could I have lived through such inhumanity and not lost faith in individual good? "Dawn" asks the question "can such a life experience translate to a changed worldview, or are we doomed to also be inhuman in our turn?"
    • 1/5
      This book I felt would be something I wrote when I had no idea on how to approach a theme. I think Weisel missed the mark on this one. I would hate to be in the head of main character trying to make an ordinary sandwich. There were to many repeated comments leaving nothing to the imagination. No surprises and at the same time no feeling of realism. I really became sick when I finished the book because it really made me remember my writing style in 5th grade.
    • 2/5
      Having been moved to tears by Night, I was expecting something different, and could not wrap my mind around the text that was presented. Extremely philosophical and political, Dawn failed to resonate with me. Perhaps, I was plagued by listening to the audiobook, which although beautifully read, did not allow ample time to ponder the deeper levels but instead provided opportunity for distractions.
    • 2/5
      After reading Night, I dived into Dawn. Then I waded, and barely floated until the end.I did not like this book. After Night this was a contrived piece of fiction. Too much like soap opera, I thought for such a talented author.But I made sure I finished it.