![]() There are also executions of supposed rebels, including a young child. ![]() At one point, Eliezer’s gold tooth is pried out of his mouth with a spoon. They’re often subject to beatings and humiliations. The selections continue to occur, and the Nazis continue to demonstrate their brutality through the slave-labor conditions that they force the Jews to work in. There, Eliezer works in an electrical factory. They march to Auschwitz and then to Buna, a work camp. Their possessions are taken from them, and their heads are shaved. One of the most horrific sights that Eliezer describes in the novel occurs when he and his father walk past a pit where Nazis are burning the bodies of children.Įveryone who was on the train, except for those who have singled out to go straight to the crematorium, is stripped. This is the first selection that determines whether they’re going to be put to work or immediately killed. By the time they arrive, they’re terrified and starving.Įliezer and his father are separated from the rest of the family when they get to Birkenau. One character, a seemingly mad woman who’s later deemed a prophet, screams about fire when they can see the camps, seemingly predicting what’s going to happen to them. They have no idea what’s happening to them. The Jews in Eliezer’s town are forced into ghettos in Sighet and then later into cattle cars that take them to the Birkenau, known as the gateway to Auschwitz. Soon, unfortunately, Moishe’s tale becomes more real. He’s ranting about the Gestapo, the German secret police, who murdered men, women, and children after leading them into the woods. ![]() He returns several months later, acting in a way that the villagers deem insane. That is, until his teacher, Moishe the Beadle, disappears. Eliezer and his family are Jewish, and he spends his time studying the Torah. The novel opens with the main character, Eliezer, living in Sighet, a town in Hungarian Transylvania. Night, often considered to be Elie Wiesel’s memoir of the Holocaust, was published in 1960. Spoiler alert: important details of the novel are revealed below. The novel also spends time in considerations of religion and justice, themes that Wiesel focuses on in his many other novels and works of non-fiction. He’s forced to contend with horrible conditions and watch his remaining loved ones suffer. Towards the end of the novel, despite the obvious end of the war, the Nazis are unwilling to surrender their prisoners, and Eliezer’s situation takes an impossible turn for the worse. At one point he has his gold tooth pried from his mouth with a spoon. claim was part of a rebel group in the camp. He watches friends and acquaintances murdered, such as thirteen year old that the S.S. There, they meet a variety of characters, all of whom are suffering in separate and similar ways.Įliezer is forced to work in an electrical factory where workers are regularly beaten and humiliated. Before being transferred to concentration camps, the Wiesel family is forced to live in a ghetto within their own village.Įliezer, as an emotional first-person narrator, tells the horrific story of how their lives were uprooted, and how Eliezer and Eliezer’s father were subjected to slave labor in Auschwitz/Birkenau. While at first, no one believed that something like the murder of innocent men, women, and children as possible, the ravings of Moishe the Beadle, Elie’s teacher, are soon proven true. The book Night follows the terrifying journey of Eliezer Wiesel and his family from their home in Sighet in Hungarian Transylvania through the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust during World War II.
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