27/2022: Night With A New Preface By The Author Elie Wiesel

Section 1: 

In 1941, Eliezer, the narrator, is a 12-year-old boy living in the Transylvanian town of Sighet. He is the only son in an Orthodox Jewish family that strictly adheres to Jewish tradition and law. A series of increasingly oppressive measures are forced on the Jews. Eventually, the Jews are confined to small ghettos behind barbed-wire fences.

Analysis Section 1:

In the first section, he laments the typical human inability to acknowledge the depth of human cruelty. The Jews of Sighet are unable or unwilling to believe in the horrors of Hitler's death camps. Moishe the Beadle is perhaps the most painful example of the Jews' refusal to believe evil exists. Night chronicles Eliezer's loss of innocence, his confrontation with evil, and his questioning of God's existence. In writing this memoir and his other works, Wiesel is attempting to complete his father's story, honour the memory of the Holocaust victims, and commemorate the traditions they left behind. Since the Holocaust, Judaism has been forced to confront the long-existent problem of theodicy.

Section 2: 

A German officer takes official charge of the train, threatening to shoot any Jew who refuses to yield his or her valuables and exterminate everybody in the car if anybody escapes. The doors to the car are nailed shut, further preventing escape. Some men and women begin to flirt openly on the train as though they were alone, while others pretend not to notice. When Madame Schächter breaks out of her bonds and continues to scream about the furnace that awaits them, she is beaten into silence by some of the boys on the train. The next night, she begins her screaming again and is tied up and gagged so that she cannot scream.

Her child, sitting next to her, watches and cries. Through the windows, everybody sees the chimneys of vast furnaces. There is an odor in the air that they soon discover is the odor of burning human flesh. This concentration camp is Birkenau, the processing center for arrivals at Auschwitz.

Analysis Section 2:

Eliezer Wiesel argues that exposure to inhuman cruelty can deprive even victims of their sense of morality and humanity. In the ghetto, Eliezer recounts, the Jews maintained their social cohesion, sense of common purpose and common morality. Once robbed of their homes and treated like animals, however, they begin to act like animals. Wiesel suggests that one of the great psychological and moral tragedies of the Holocaust is the death of faith in God as well as faith in humankind. The Holocaust is almost too awful a story to convey, yet he insists it must be told because it is crucial that those who hear the story believe, and act on their beliefs before it is too late.

Section 3:

After arriving at Auschwitz, Eliezer and his father are told to lie about their ages by Dr. Mengele, who is determining whether they are fit to work or to be killed immediately. As the prisoners move through Birkenau, they are horrified to see a huge pit where babies are being burned, and another for adults. Some among the younger Jews begin to consider rebelling, but older Jews advise them to rely on faith. When Eliezer and his father are marched into the Nazi death camp at Birkenau, he asks his father if there is humanity in the world of the crematoria. In the barracks, they express faith in God and trust in divine redemption.

Analysis Section 3:

Nightstands are on the borderline between fiction and memoir. Author Elie Wiesel breaks conventions of traditional fiction writing in order, to tell the truth about historical events. He shows us only what Eliezer sees and thinks at a given moment; his limited perspective and lack of knowledge make the story all the more terrifying. The night is intended as a brief, harrowing portrait of Wiesel's life during the Holocaust. Eliezer Wiesel describes his first night in Birkenau and the lasting impact of that night in perhaps the most famous, and most moving, paragraph in all of Night.

The repetition of the phrase "Never shall I forget" illustrates how Eliezer's experiences are forever burned into his mind. Fear of silence figures prominently in this memoir, as it is silence in the face of evil, Wiesel believes, that allows evil to survive.

Section 4: 

After passing quarantine and medical inspection, Eliezer is chosen by a Kapo to serve in a unit of prisoners whose job entails counting electrical fittings. Akiba Drummer predicts that deliverance from the camps is imminent. The narrator skips forward several years to recount how he runs into the same girl, now a woman, on the Métro in Paris. He explains that she was a Jew passing as an Aryan on forged papers but not a concentration camp prisoner. During an Allied air raid on Buna, Eliezer and many other prisoners watch as a man risks his life to crawl to the soup.

A week later, the Nazis erect a gallows in the central square and publicly hang another man who had attempted to steal something. Although the prisoners are all so jaded by suffering that they never cry, they all break into tears as they watch the child strangle on the end of the noose.

Analysis Section 4:

The death of the innocent child represents the death of Eliezer's own innocence. In this section, he has become someone different from the child he was at the beginning of the Holocaust. He has lost his faith and morals as well as his sense of morals and values. The harrowing scene of the child's murder with which this section concludes symbolically enacts the murder of God. Eliezer Wiesel's memoir Night is one of the few places in which he jumps into the future to explain what happened after the liberation of the concentration camps.

This chance meeting on the Métro is the kind of coincidental twist that a novelist might invent but that rarely occurs in nonfiction. Several such coincidences do happen in Night, but none of them lessens the truthful impact of the story.

Section 5: 

During the High Holidays, he mocks the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people and believes a man is stronger than God. He decides to eat on Yom Kippur, the day on which Jews traditionally fast to atone for their sins. In Buna, Eliezer tells of a devout rabbi who confesses that he can no longer believe in God after what he has seen in the concentration camps. He worries that his father will not pass the selection among those deemed too weak to work and will be executed. Others are also beginning to lose their faith as they suffer in the cold. The Germans decide to evacuate the camp before the Russians arrive but choose to evacuate Buna with the others instead of evacuating the Jews in the infirmary.

Analysis Section 5: 

The High Holidays are the time of divine judgment in Jewish tradition. In the concentration camps, Eliezer hints, a horrible reversal has taken place. Soon after Rosh Hashanah, the SS (Nazi police) performs a selection on the prisoners at Buna. All the prisoners pass before Dr. Mengele, the Nazi doctor, and he determines who is condemned to death and who can go on living. Eliezer Wiesel seems to affirm that life without faith or hope of some kind is empty; yet, even in rejecting God, Eliezer and his fellow Jews cannot erase God from their consciousness.

In his autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel speaks at greater length about his religious feelings after the Holocaust. "I had seen too much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered," he writes. Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night is often seen as a work that offers no hope at all. In it, he seems unable to reject the Jewish tradition and the Jewish God completely, even though he declares his loss of faith. One might argue that the very existence of Night demonstrates Eliezer's continued belief in the importance of human life.

Section 6-7:

Anybody who stops running is shot by the SS; Zalman, a boy running alongside Eliezer, decides he can run no further and is trampled to death. Father and son keep each other awake and support each other, surviving only through mutual vigilance. After three days without bread and water, there is another selection. Eliezer's father is thrown from the train, almost mistaken for dead, but Eliezer wakes him up. The train travels for ten days and nights, and the Jews go unfed, living on snow.

As they pass through German towns, some of the locals throw bread into the car to enjoy watching the Jews kill each other for good. When the train arrives at Buchenwald, only twelve out of the 100 men alive are still alive.

Analysis Section 6-7:

In one account, a son beats his father to death for a crust of bread. The story recalls the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac, in which God intervenes just as Abraham is about to sacrifice his son Isaac. Eliezer feels great guilt at his father's death, which drives him to record the events of the Holocaust and repay his sacrifice. The parallel between the Parisian woman's "charity" and the actions of the German townspeople is clear. Wiesel tells the story to show that cruel behaviors are not limited to the Holocaust and that human nature has a wicked streak.