Night By Eliezer Wiesel: Summary

Night
By
Elie Wiesel
Introduction: Elizer Wiesel was born in the town call Sighet, Transylvania. “Night” is a novel that shows the author’s experience with his father at a German nazi concentration camp. The novel takes place during the height of the Holocaust and almost at the end of World War Two. Night is a great book and I would recommend everybody to read it. It is sad and hard to get through but it is worth it to read.
Overview: Eliezer Wiesel was a Jewish teenager who was living in his hometown Sighet, Transylvania. He was only twelve years old at that time. Elie was studying Talmud and at the mean time he wanted to study Kabbalah. He asked his father’s permission, but he was told that “You are too young for that. Maimonides tells
His studying was interrupted when his teacher, Moishe the Beadle, was deported from Sighet because he was foreign Jew. In a few months, Moishe returned, telling a horrifying tale: the Gestapo took charge of his train, led everyone into the woods, and systematically butchered them. Nobody believed Moishe and they thought that he’s going mad. Years pass by and in the spring of 1944, Germans occupied Hungary. They set up ghettos for the Jews. After a while, the Nazis began the deportation of the Jews to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. The Jews were forced into crowded cattle wagons, each containing of eighty people. The conditions of the train ride were horrific; they were treated no better than animals. A woman named Madame Schachter starts to go mad. She yells, “Fire! I can see a fire!” She yells about fire flames throughout the train ride. Everybody try to quiet her, but she was yelling none stop. When the train arrived at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz, they saw the fire flames and the air smelled of burning
Because of the horrific conditions in the camps and the ever-present danger of death, many prisoners themselves began to slide into cruelty, concerned only with personal survival. Sons began to abandon and abuse their fathers. Eliezer himself began to lose his humanity and his faith, both in God and in the people around him. He witnessed several hangings. Elie and his father managed to survive through the selection process, where the unfit are condemned to crematory. He suffered from a foot injury that placed him in a hospital. After the surgery, the Germans decide to relocate the prisoners because of the advancement of the Russian army. They were forced to run for more than fifty miles to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. Many died of exposure to the harsh weather and exhaustion. The march leads to a train ride where Elie witnessed a boy killing his father for a morsel of bread. Elie was horrified from his own thoughts, but he realized that he too had become callous-that he was beginning to care only about his own survival. At Gleiwitz, the prisoners were herded into cattle cars once again. They began another deadly journey: one hundred Jews board the car, but only twelve remain alive when the train reaches the concentration camp Buchenwald. In their horrifying journey, Eliezer and his father helped each other to survive by means of mutual support and concern. Although Elie’s father