The Holocaust In Eliezer Wiesel's Night

Eliezer Wiesel, a boy from Sighet, has survived a horrible experience in the hands of the Germans. It all started in 1942 when Moishe the Beadle, his friend and instructor in the Kabbalah, was deported from Sighet. Moishe escaped to warn others of the horrors that awaited them. Sadly, no one wanted to listen, even though Eliezer “[had] asked [his] father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave” (Wiesel 08). A few months after that, the Germans invaded Sighet, promptly ordered the Jews to give up anything valuable, and then ended up making them stay with other Jews in a ghetto. After, Jews were eventually deported in cattle cars, not knowing where they were to end up. Eliezer’s first view of the concentration camp where they first arrived was “flames rising from a small chimney into a black sky” (Wiesel 27) and “In the air, the smell of burning flesh” (Wiesel 28). Life in the concentration camps was awfully
They eventually made it to Gleiwitz, after runing rank by rank in the snow over a forty-two mile route. Three days after arriving in Gleiwitz, they are put into cattle cars and taken to Buchenwald. However, many of them died on the 10 day trip. After arriving, Eliezer attempts to help his father regain his health, but a combination of dysentery and malnutrition lead to him becoming delirious, so when Shlomo will not stop asking for water, an officer viciously beats him. The next day, Eliezer wakes up to find that his father is dead and gone. Just a few months after Shlomo’s death, Buchenwald is freed by American forces. They were freed, and, according to Eliezer, “at six o’clock that afternoon, the first American tank stood guard at the gates of Bunchenwald” (114). Three days later he got food poisoning and was sent to a hospital, and he is currently recovering from his