Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

These lines come from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir *Night*, in which he recounts his deportation as a teenager from Sighet to Auschwitz and then Buna. The passage occurs early in the camp experience, after the first night when the reality of the лагер system—violence, dehumanization, and mass murder—shatters the moral and religious world he had known. Wiesel frames the memory as an irreversible turning point: the moment when faith, innocence, and ordinary time are broken, and the rest of life becomes haunted by that inaugural night. The repeated “Never shall I forget” functions as both testimony and vow of remembrance.

The quote is an incantatory declaration of memory as obligation. By repeating “Never shall I forget,” Wiesel emphasizes that the trauma is not a single recollection but a permanent condition—an inner “night” that continues long after liberation. The language of curse and sealing suggests a fate stamped onto the self, while “murdered my God and my soul” conveys the collapse of religious certainty and moral order under genocidal terror. The final “Never” is both personal and collective: a refusal to let the victims’ suffering be erased, and a warning that forgetting would be a second annihilation.