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Summary and Analysis of Night
Based on the Book by Elie Wiesel
By Worth Books OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4469-1
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Preface to the New Translation by Elie Wiesel
Wiesel describes Night as the definitive text of his career as an author and examines his reasons for having written it: to keep a historical record as a duty to the dead, as a small act of vengeance against the perpetrators, and as a warning for the future — lest history repeats itself. He discusses the difficulties he faced in the writing process, thwarted by the feeling that language seemed ineffectual, words like "hunger — thirst — fear" could not adequately express the magnitude of the situation, having taken on different meanings during the war.
He notes that Night was rejected by all major publishers when originally submitted, and he quotes at length from sections removed from the original published text that discuss the naiveté of a belief in God, a detailed account of his father being beaten just before his death, and an anguished lengthier ending. He explains that with his greater command of English than when the book was originally published, he felt a new translation was warranted.
Need to Know:Night is a damning record of the most reprehensible acts of genocide in human history, a memorial for its victims, and a grave reminder of the destructive powers of fascism and bigotry. With the distance of time, Wiesel confesses he no longer knows what he had hoped to achieve in writing it, but that he continues to believe in his moral obligation to bear witness and keep the events from disappearing from history. The 2006 edition was translated by his wife, Marion Wiesel, who has translated many of Wiesel's other works.
Foreword by François Mauriac
Author and Nobel laureate François Mauriac recalls meeting a young Wiesel in Tel Aviv where the latter was working as a journalist. Mauriac had mentioned to Wiesel how he had been haunted by his wife's description of Jews being forced onto cattle cars at the Austerlitz train station and Wiesel revealed that he had been among them. Mauriac declares the most affecting aspect of Night to be young Wiesel's loss of religious faith, referencing Friedrich Nietzsche's assertion that "God is dead."
For Mauriac, however, experiencing the events of Night secondhand, the book is an affirmation of faith and the endurance of the Jewish people.
Need to Know: François Mauriac highlights one of the major themes of the book: the possibility of maintaining a belief in God in the face of indescribable evil. He describes Wiesel as "a Lazarus risen from the dead," echoing the final image of the book.
Chapter One
It is 1941 and Elie is twelve years old, living in the small Transylvania town of Sighet with his parents and three sisters. A devoutly religious boy, he spends his free time with a local vagabond, Moishe the Beadle, studying the Zohar, the Kabbalistic books of Jewish mysticism, with little thought of the war. Suddenly, all foreign Jews are deported from Sighet, including Moishe.
The deportees are forgotten until, months later, Moishe returns. He describes his harrowing ordeal: People had been taken to Poland, ordered by the Gestapo to dig their own graves, and then executed. Babies were used for target practice. Moishe managed to play dead and then escape. His account of these events is meant as a warning to the Jews of Sighet, but no one is listening; no one believes genocide is possible in the twentieth century. Life has returned to normal and the news of the war has been mostly promising.
Then, in 1944, the Germans invade Hungary and soldiers appear in Sighet. Jewish community leaders are taken into custody and the wearing of yellow stars becomes compulsory. The Jews are cordoned into two ghettos walled in with barbed wire. One evening, Wiesel's father, Shlomo, returns from a town meeting and declares that they are soon to be transported out of Sighet. No one knows where they will be going. The Wiesels are scheduled for the last convoy and Elie watches as the others begin their dismal procession.
Elie notes the piles of possessions abandoned on the ground, the houses emptied and desolate like tombs, while the sun shines absurdly in the sky. As his family makes their own march to the smaller ghetto, Elie sees his father cry for the first time. This is the beginning of his hatred for their oppressors.
A few days later, the remaining Jews are corralled into the synagogue, which has been vandalized, and then ushered onto cattle cars for transport at eighty persons per car.
Need to Know: The Jews in Sighet failed to heed Moishe the Beadle's warnings that they were in grave danger. This refusal to believe the cruelty of the Nazis and potential annihilation foreshadows later events. Night serves as a cautionary tale about the terrible risk of ignoring or refusing to believe eyewitness testimony. Moishe the Beadle's belief that he was spared death in order to warn his people of the horrors to come reiterates Wiesel's sense of responsibility to bear witness for the dead, the living, and future generations.
Chapter 2
The cattle car is packed beyond capacity and people must take turns sitting. A German officer barks orders and threats — if a single person goes missing, they will all be shot. A woman on the train, Mrs. Schächter, has been separated from her husband and two of her sons, and she is hallucinating from grief. Looking out the window, she begins shouting about a fire. Everyone gathers to look, but there is nothing there. Her screaming continues until the other captives lose their patience and gag her.
Hours later, she frees herself from the gag and begins screaming again, still about the imagined fire, and this time they beat her into silence. The transport pulls into the station at Auschwitz. Prisoners drift by with information, claiming the conditions of the camp are humane, and the captives are relieved, but then the train continues on a little farther. Mrs. Schächter begins to scream again. Only this time, everyone can see the flames, and smell the stench of the crematorium. They have arrived at Birkenau.
Need to Know: Like Moishe the Beadle, Mrs. Schächter issues a warning that the Jews fail to heed because of her perceived madness. After enduring abominable conditions on the transport, the prisoners arrive at the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the middle of the night, reinforcing one of the symbols (night) Wiesel uses throughout the book.
Chapter Three
Upon disembarking from the transport, the men and women are separated. Wiesel never saw his mother or youngest sister again, although the eldest two sisters survived. A prisoner warns Elie to tell the guards that he is not fifteen, but eighteen, and for his father to say that he is forty, not fifty. Another prisoner makes an ominous statement — they should have killed themselves when they had the chance — and begins shouting about the crematorium.
Dr. Josef Mengele arrives and questions the captives about their age and health, separating the young and healthy from the old and infirm, who are destined for the crematorium. Wiesel and his father are both spared in this first selection. Wiesel witnesses SS guards throwing children into a burning ditch nearby. Someone is reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and young Elie feels his first twinge of anger at God, and later describes this first night as filled with "moments that murdered my God."
The new prisoners are stripped, shaved, and soaked in disinfectant. A guard informs them they can choose to work or go to the crematorium. The Gypsy in charge of the barracks slaps Elie's father and the boy finds himself already too demoralized to react. The sun continues to shine incongruously as the prisoners are marched into Auschwitz.
After being allowed to sleep, they awaken with renewed morale, and heartened by rumors that the war will be over soon. They are tattooed with their prisoner numbers, and Elie becomes "A-7713." A distant relative finds the Wiesels and asks if they have any word of his wife and children. Elie lies, claiming that they did have news that his family is fine, but when a new transport arrives from the man's town he presumably learns the truth and Elie never sees him again.
Akiba Drumer, a particularly devout fellow prisoner, insists that God is testing the Jews and they must remain faithful. After several weeks in Auschwitz, the humane barracks guard is replaced by someone far more vicious, and then the Wiesels are transported to an Auschwitz "sub-camp."
Need to Know: The prisoners respond in different ways to their horrifying circumstances. Some cling to rumors that the war will be ending soon, while others take solace in their faith. Some wish they'd been selected for the crematorium or want to end things quickly at their own hand, including, at various points, Elie and his father. It is in this chapter that the overarching question of whether faith is possible in the midst of horror begins to develop most powerfully.
Chapter Four
In their new location, the sub-camp Buna, Elie and his father are housed with some young musicians, including Juliek, a young Polish violinist. They will be working in a warehouse counting electrical accessories. The work isn't too hard, and when Elie requests to stay with his father, his father is assigned to work beside him. Here Elie meets Yossi and Tibi, Czech brothers whose parents were exterminated.
All of the prisoners are forced to have their gold fillings removed, but Elie talks his way out of this by feigning illness. Later he is badly beaten by Idek, a volatile psychopathic guard, and comforted by a French woman. Years later, as an adult, he meets the woman again in Paris and they spend an evening remembering their time in the camp and learning each other's histories. When Idek beats Elie's father, he finds his anger is directed at his father and not the guard, thinking that his father should have been able to avoid the madman's brutality.
Elie recognizes his time in the concentration camp is changing him. Franek, the foreman of their work detail, notices Elie is still in possession of his gold filling. When Elie refuses to submit to the surgery, Franek punishes Elie's father for Elie's offense. Ultimately, Elie gives in and is operated on in a latrine with a rusted spoon. Another day, Elie stumbles upon Idek in an intimate moment with a young Polish girl in the warehouse and he is whipped until he loses consciousness.
Sirens go off one afternoon, indicating a nearby air raid; the Allies are bombing the factories. No one is permitted to leave the barracks. In the confusion, two vats of soup have been left in the center of the compound, unguarded. The prisoners stand at their windows, rapt by the sight of the soup. Finally, one man crawls on his elbows across the courtyard. He reaches the soup and is immediately shot dead. The Allied planes had dropped bombs that destroyed the Buna factory, but this starving prisoner reaching for the soup was the only casualty of the air raid.
Soon after, a gallows is erected at the center of the camp and prisoners are forced to watch the hangings. Wiesel recalls the hanging of a cherubic child, the young protégé of a Dutch work crew supervisor who had been stockpiling weapons. The child took half an hour to die as an onlooker cried out, "For God's sake, where is God?"
Need to Know: This chapter contains some of the most violent episodes that Wiesel recounts from his period of captivity. The story of the man trying to get to the soup is a parable of the fatalism that is the result of extreme deprivation. This man was either brave enough to risk his life for the soup, or so resigned to his death that he no longer feared it. Wiesel remembers his silent answer to the voice calling out to God at the child's hanging: that God himself is hanging from the gallows. Wiesel now believes that God is dead.
Chapter Five
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah — the day that marks the Jewish New Year — the Jews gather to pray, but Elie no longer has faith in his heart. On the contrary, he is angry with God, declaring himself God's accuser.
On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement — the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar — they are unsure whether it is safe to fast, as is tradition, given that they are already on the verge of starvation. Some argue fasting is even more important in these terrible circumstances because it would show God that they're still capable of worshipping Him. Elie's father forbids him from doing so, but Elie admits he wouldn't have fasted anyway, as a way of rebelling against God.
One day, Dr. Mengele arrives in camp to do a "selection," which is the euphemistic name for sentencing the ill, infirm, or old to the crematorium. The barracks captain assures them they will all be fine, but Elie is nevertheless relieved when neither he, nor his father, have their prison numbers recorded by Mengele. Then, on the day when the prisoners whose names had been recorded are told to stay behind in camp while the others go to work, Elie's father is among them. He insists that Elie take his knife and spoon and they say an emotional goodbye, but when Elie returns from work, his father is still there and Elie returns the knife and spoon to him.
Akiba Drumer, the once-devout prisoner, is selected. By now, he, too, has lost his faith, and Elie believes that once the man's faith was shattered, so was the man. Before he is taken away, Drumer asks the prisoners to say Kaddish — the Hebrew prayer for the dead — for him in three days, but they are so consumed by hardship that they forget to do so.
It is now winter. Elie's foot begins to swell and he is moved to the infirmary. Elie is worried about amputation and being judged unable to work, but the operation he undergoes is a success. Two days later, cannons are heard in the distance: The Red Army is moving closer. Elie and his father must choose whether to stay behind in the infirmary and hope for rescue or prepare for transport with the rest of the prisoners. Afraid any Jews still in the camp will be executed, they choose to be transported.
Wiesel notes that he later learned that those who stayed behind were indeed liberated by the Russians. The SS absurdly order the prisoners to clean the barracks before departure, and then, under cover of darkness, they evacuate the camp, making the brutal march in the snow.
Need to Know: The High Holy days come even to the camps. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are observed and the connection among the men is palpable and somewhat surreal in the surroundings. Elie recounts his loss of faith, declaring himself stronger without it; yet terribly lonely as a man without God or the community of believers he had once been part of. Wiesel's father narrowly escapes the crematorium, but Akiba Drumer does not, which Elie connects to the man's loss of faith, deepening Wiesel's exploration of this theme.
Chapter Six
Upon evacuation, the prisoners are forced to run through the snow for hours. Those who fall behind are shot. Elie would like to give up and succumb to death, but he knows he cannot do this for his father's sake. They run all night and into the morning, then they are briefly allowed to rest in an abandoned brick factory with a caved-in roof. Elie's father insists that he not fall asleep in the snow carpeting the factory floor — doing so could be deadly.
They are surrounded by the dead and dying. Rabbi Eliahu, a man Elie knows from the camp, approaches and asks if Elie has seen his son. The rabbi had fallen behind while they were running, he explains, and his son hadn't noticed. They had managed to survive together for three years and he can't imagine that now the end is so near they would be separated. Elie says he hasn't seen him, but he remembers later that he had observed this moment, that the man's son had seen him falling behind and continued on, running for his life. Elie hopes he will never have to make this choice, between his own life and his father's.
The prisoners arrive at the Gleiwitz concentration camp. There is chaos in the barracks as people try to push their way inside. After nearly being suffocated, Elie finds Juliek, the Polish violinist he met at Buna. In the night, he hears Juliek playing a Beethoven concerto, but, in the morning, Juliek is dead, the violin beside him, trampled.
They continue to hear cannons as the Russian army presses on in pursuit. Before they decamp again, there is a selection. Those sent to the left would go no further, those sent to the right would continue on. When his father is sent to the left, Elie causes a commotion that allows his father and other prisoners to switch sides, narrowly averting death. A train arrives to take them away. The prisoners are so thin they fit one hundred to a car.
Need to Know: Elie struggles with both his desire to die and his impulse to live. His wish for death is mitigated by his sense of responsibility for his father — how would his father survive if Elie were to die? Most of the prisoners have given up on their hope that the Russians will liberate them before they succumb in one of the camps.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Night by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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