Dawn

Elisha is a young Holocaust survivor living in British Mandatory Palestine in the years after World War II. He has joined the Movement, a Zionist paramilitary group fighting British rule, and the Movement now gives him an order.

The British authorities have sentenced a Jewish fighter to execution. In retaliation, the Movement tells Elisha to kill an English hostage, David Ben Moshe. He has until dawn.

The whole novel takes place over that single night, as Elisha waits for morning and for the moment he is meant to become a killer. The question that hangs over the hours is what violence does to a man who has already lived through the camps. Another follows it: whether killing for a cause can ever be told apart from killing itself.

Wiesel wrote it as the middle volume of his Night trilogy, and it marks his first venture into fiction. Night is autobiographical, while Dawn is invented, though it draws directly on Wiesel's own experience and on his questioning after the war about faith, guilt and moral responsibility. The confined timeframe gives it a tense, inward, brooding pace.