Dawn

Dawn is the second book in Elie Wiesel's Night trilogy, and his first work of fiction. Set in British Mandatory Palestine in the years after World War II, it follows Elisha, a young Holocaust survivor who has joined a Zionist paramilitary group known as the Movement. When a Jewish fighter is sentenced to execution by the British authorities, the Movement orders Elisha to carry out the retaliatory killing of an English hostage, David Ben Moshe.

The novel unfolds over a single night as Elisha waits for dawn and the moment he must become a killer. Wiesel uses that night to explore what violence does to a person who has already survived the camps, and whether taking a life in the name of a cause can ever be separated from the taking of life itself.

Unlike Night, which is autobiographical, Dawn is a work of fiction, though it draws directly on Wiesel's own experience and post-war questioning of faith, guilt, and moral responsibility.