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Night is a work by Elie Wiesel (pictured) about his experience with his father in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. In just over 100 pages of a narrative described as devastating in its simplicity, Weisel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the father-child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful caregiver. He was 16 years old when Buchenwald was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, too late for his father who died in the camp after a beating. After some difficulty finding a publisher, Wiesel's work appeared in Yiddish in 1955 and French in 1958, and in September 1960 was published in English by Hill and Wang. Fifty years later it is regarded as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. It is the first book in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, Day—marking Wiesel's transition from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. "In Night," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night." (more...)

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• The Basque nationalist group ETA, which operates mainly in Spain, announces a ceasefire, the first since a similar 2006 declaration.
• In one of the longest trials in Portuguese history, six men are convicted on charges stemming from the child sexual abuse at the Casa Pia children's home in Lisbon.
• A bombing at a Shia rally in Quetta, Pakistan, marking Quds Day kills at least 73 people and injures 200 others.
• A 7.1-magnitude earthquake (shakemap pictured) strikes the South Island of New Zealand, causing widespread damage in Christchurch.
• Typhoon Kompasu makes landfall in South Korea, becoming the strongest typhoon to affect Seoul in fifteen years.
• Hurricane Earl makes landfall as a Category 1 hurricane in the Canadian Maritimes, leaving nearly one million people without power.
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September 6: Labour Day in Canada and Labor Day in the United States (2010); Independence Day in Swaziland; Defence Day in Pakistan; Unification Day in Bulgaria

• 394 – Forces of the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius I (pictured) defeated Eugenius, the usurper of the Western Roman Empire, at the Battle of the Frigidus near modern-day Vipava, Slovenia.
• 1955 – An overwhelming Turkish mob attacked ethnic Greeks in Istanbul, killing over 13 people, wounding over thirty others, and damaging over 5,000 Greek-owned homes and businesses.
• 1963 – The Krulak Mendenhall mission, led by U.S. Marine Corps Major General Victor Krulak and U.S. Foreign Service Officer Joseph Mendenhall, was launched by the Kennedy administration to assess the progress of the Vietnam War, and the viability of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem against the backdrop of the Buddhist crisis and Xa Loi Pagoda raids.
• 1970 – Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four jet aircraft en route from Europe to New York City, landing two of them at Dawson's Field in Zerqa, Jordan, and one plane in Beirut, Lebanon. The fourth hijacking was successfully foiled.
• 2000 – The Millennium Summit, a meeting of world leaders to discuss the role of the United Nations at the turn of the 21st century, opened in New York City.

More anniversaries: September 5 – September 6 – September 7