Chapter 13: “Never Shall I Forget”: Mixed Media Responses to Elie Wiesel’s Night

While the “response to literature” essay is one way to assess students’ reading comprehension, rarely does it fully illustrate the learner’s socio-emotional development or deepening sense of empathy. The Holocaust memoir Night is typically a text addressed before sophomore year, but our school has assigned it as part of our 10th grade available texts. Its Lexile level makes the book easy to comprehend, but difficult to process emotionally. Night is a crucial text because it makes vivid the atrocities committed in World War II. Writing an essay over the memoir’s most arresting scenes would not convey their lasting impact; students need to respond to the text on a more visceral level. Without this catharsis, students may feel a lack of closure to the unit and lingering feelings of unease.