Night

=Night by Elie Wiesel=



Setting
This story takes place in Germany at Multiple Concentration Camps. Each one bringing new hardship to Eliezer Wiesel.

Sighet was the hometown of Eliezer. His family was forced by the Nazis to move to the ghetto areas and then after to leave their town.

Birkenau was the principal camp set up by the Nazis. It was where all the racist murders took place. Families were separated here before moving on to other concentration sites. Eliezer is separated from his family here. Eleizer watches the death of a truckload of children. He clearly says that that is a Night he will never forget.

Auschwitz was a death camp, prison camp, industrial center, and labor camp. This camp had gas chambers set up. Eliezer tells us in his autobiography that he was labeled with a number. The unskilled workers were marched to the next camp.

At Buna Eliezer works at an electronics factory. After a while him and his father are relocated to a block building where they must move heavy stones. His father was on the verge of being killed but he convinced SS Guards that he was still able to work. One day the camp is being bombarded, and the prisoners begin to have hope again. Though later on they are forced to march to another time.

The prisoners that survived have been marched to Gleiwitz. They suffer cold and starvation. Once they arrive at Gleiwitz, the prisoners are staved for three days and crowded into barracks. Many were dying and suffering from illness. After the three days end, Eliezer recounts being packed unto a train to be sent to the center of Germany.

Buchenwald was a Camp set up in 1937 for political prisoners. The camp housed around 80,000 inmates by 1945. It was a forced labor camp. Many of the people who died were burned in the camp crematorium. This camp included the infamous Block 64 that housed to the horrible medical experiments toward the prisoners. Eliezer Wiesel and his father were one of the ten that made it to the camp. But as faith had it, Eliezer was left alone when his father died shortly after arriving to the camp.



**Historical Context**
  Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor, or magistrate of Germany on January 30, 1933 and he started his first concentration camp in Dachau,   Germany. Socialists, Communist, and other labor leaders worked there, too. On August 2, 1934 Hitler declared himself the Führer, or “leader”, of Germany. He made laws known as the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that took the Jewish German’s civil rights away and made Jews a separate race. One of his first attacks took place on November 9, 1938. Jewish churches and businesses were destroyed and about 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and as a result, World War II started.Camps were set up in Poland and Jews were required to wear the Star of David as an identification tag. If any Jew was to try to leave the camps, their punishment was death. In 1941, troops were ordered to basically kill any Jew spotted until the fall of 1942 when Hitler decided to gather them together and kill them in masses. Chelmno was one of the first death camps where approximately 11 million deaths took place.

The Jews were told they were moving to a safer place when in actuality they were being taken to their deaths. In the camps about 5.8 and 5 million others were killed as well including homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses. Most camps were closed by 1943 except Auschwitz. This was around the time that Elie Wiesel and his family was taken to this camp. Soon after him and his father were taken elsewhere west of Auschwitz. Hitler was able to keep the camps a secret during the war but they closed them down in the summer of 1945. The remaining prisoners were forced to walk to camps in the middle of Germany, although not all of them made it there. Resistance groups did exist in these camps and by October 7, 1944 resistance started and continued until the end of the war.

Elie Wiesel wrote __Night__ in 1955, 10 years after he was freed from Auschwitz. He stayed quited for a long time, enabling him to remember his memories deeply.

The book __Night__ not only took place during the Holocaust or when Hitler was elected ruler of Germany, it was also during the time of World War II which occurred during the time that these two events took place. World War II started in the late 1930’s and ended in 1944. About 60 million people, including 6 million from the Holocaust were killed and many others were injured. The war was a very huge cost, about a trillion U.S dollars which makes World War II one of the most costliest war in history, not only in causalities but money as well. Even people that were still alive after the war ended were very traumatized, especially survivors of concentration camps.

In concentration camps, many people died from being malnourished, mistreated, diseases that were rampant, and working too hard. Some people were killed if they were unfit for labor by mass shooting or using a gas chamber which was a closed chamber that poisonous gases came out of to kill the person. Sometimes chemicals such as hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are used in the gas chamber instead. Prisoners sent to concentration camps were usually sent under horrifying conditions in rail cars that usually carried cargo or animals. Prisoners were usually confined to the rail cars for long periods of time without any food and/or water. Usually only ten prisoners-to-be would be the only survivors out of a car with 100 prisoners to be.

In many concentration camps, colored badges were used to identify a certain group of people, for example, green triangles for common criminals, pink for homosexuals, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, black for Gypsies, and yellow for Jews, all the groups that were ostracized in Nazi Germany.

Many characters in the book __Night__ were not only weakened physically by the time they were liberated, but emotionally scarred from watching many people suffer and suffering themselves. Elie Weisel was deeply effected by all of the suffering that was caused in Auschwitz which caused him to succumb to silence for 10 years.



Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel in Sighet, Transylvania, which is present day Romania. He is a writer, activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 40 books and the best known of these books is //Night//, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps. Wiesel is known to have delivered a power message of “peace, atonement, and human dignity” to humanity.

In 1944 Elie, his family, and the rest of the town were placed in one or two of the ghettos in Sighet. Elie and his family lived in the larger of the two; the one located on Serpent Street. On May 16, 1944, the Hungarian deported the Jewish communities to the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here the number A-7713 was tattooed on his arm and he was separated from his mother and sister, who are believed to have been killed in Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were sent to a work camp and he tried to remain with his father as they worked under harsh conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the closing days of the war. On April 11, Wiesel’s father died of dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion. The last word he spoke was Eliezer, Elie’s name.

After the war, Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage where he learned the French language and was reunited with his two older sisters, Hilda and Bea. He began studying philosophy, taught Hebrew, and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist. He wrote for Israeli and French papers but for ten years he refused to write or speak of the experiences of the Holocaust. Wiesel could not find the words to describe them. François Mauriac, a man who eventually became Wiesel’s close friend persuaded him to write about his Holocaust experiences.

//Night//, a work by Wiesel, is based on his experiences, as a young Jew, of being sent with his family to the German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Stated on Wikipedia.com the recurring themes are Wiesel’s disgust with mankind and his loss of faith in God, reflected in the father-child relationship as his father weakens to a helpless state and the teenager becomes his father’s caregiver. This book reflects Wiesel’s state of mind during and after the Holocaust. Wiesel gives details of the cruelty that the prisoners experience and the tone reflects the personal and painful experiences of a single victim. Wiesel always relates the autobiographical events from his perspective. The narrator’s story parallels Wiesel’s biography. Wiesel and his life and story are the models for //Night//. The story of //Night// and Wiesel’s life are practically the same but with minor details. .

****Works Cited****
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/night/section11.html

**External Links**
  [|Historical Context of Night]