After going through traumatic and horrifying events, people experience different feelings when looking back on everything that happened. These feelings can include anger, sadness, despair, hopelessness, etc. In different versions of the ending of Elie Wiesel's memoir entitled 'Night', some of these feelings can be observed and detected. In the published English translation of 'Night', the ending presents the author's reflection on his personal experience and self. This ending seems to be associated more with a feeling of sadness. On the other hand, the version of the ending presented in the preface expresses his concerned feeling about the memory of the Holocaust. Wiesel seemed to be feeling angrier when he wrote this version of the end.
The first draft of the ending (Yiddish version) presented in the preface expresses Wiesel's concerned feeling about the memory of the Holocaust. It seems to have been written at a time when the whole experience was still fresh in time and when Wiesel was feeling angrier and darker when thinking about the past events. As we can read in the preface, he even describes this version as "a gloomy meditation on the present" (Wiesel xii). In this specific version, Wiesel claims that people are moving too quickly and that not enough importance is accorded to remembering the events of the Holocaust. He also seems to feel like justice hasn't been served to the perpetrators of the Second World War. These statements can be supported by passages from the Yiddish version, like for example: "And now, scarcely ten years after Buchenwald, I realize that the world forgets quickly" (Wiesel xii), or "Ilse Koch, the notorious sadistic monster of Buchenwald, was allowed to have children and live happily ever after War criminals stroll through the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past seems to have been erased, relegated to oblivion.