Night () is a 1956 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir. Wiesel called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account.Franklin, Ruth (23 March 2006). "A Thousand Darknesses". The New Republic.
Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghetto in his hometown of Sighet, Romania, to his migration through multiple concentration camps. The typical parent–child relationship is inverted as his father dwindled in the camps to a helpless state while Wiesel himself became his teenaged caregiver.In Night: "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In the memoir, everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends", a kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."(; ). His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after deteriorating from dysentery and a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above him for fear of being beaten too. The memoir ends shortly after the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.
After the war, Wiesel moved to Paris and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, which was edited into a 245-page book which was published in Argentina in 1956 as Un di velt hot geshvign.; . The novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages, edited by Jérôme Lindon, as the fragmented narrative La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 Hill & Wang in New York published a 116-page translation of the French book as Night.
The Night version has been translated into 30 languages and ranks as one of the cornerstones of Holocaust literature. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art. Night is the first in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, Day—marking Wiesel's transition during and after the Holocaust from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. "In Night," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."; for the quote, , citing Morton A. Reichek (Spring 1976). "Elie Wiesel: Out of the Night". Present Tense, 46.
Background
Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania (now Romania), to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, and his wife, Sarah (née Feig). The family lived in a community of 10,000–20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Northern Transylvania had been annexed by Hungary in 1940, and restrictions on Jews were already in place, but the period Wiesel discusses at the beginning of the book, 1941–1943, was a relatively calm one for the Jewish population.
That changed at midnight on Saturday, 18 March 1944, with the invasion of Hungary by Nazi Germany, and the arrival in Budapest of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann to oversee the deportation of the country's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. From 5 April, Jews over the age of six had to wear a 10 x 10 cm (3.8 x 3.8 in) yellow badge on the upper-left side of their coats or jackets. Jews had to declare the value of their property, and were forbidden from moving home, travelling, owning cars or radios, listening to foreign radio stations, or using the telephone. Jewish authors could no longer be published, their books were removed from libraries, and Jewish civil servants, journalists and lawyers were sacked.
As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe, the mass deportations began at a rate of four trains a day from Hungary to Auschwitz, each train carrying around 3,000 people. Between 15 May and 8 July 1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews are recorded as having been sent there on 147 trains, most gassed on arrival., citing Edmund Veesenmayer, Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary; . The transports comprised most of the Jewish population outside Budapest, the Hungarian capital.
Between 16 May and 27 June, 131,641 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania."Transylvania" . Yad Vashem. Wiesel, his parents and sisters—older sisters Hilda and Beatrice and seven-year-old Tzipora—were among them. On arrival Jews were "selected" for the death or forced labour; to be sent to the left meant work, to the right, the gas chamber. Sarah and Tzipora were sent to the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the rest of the family. Wiesel and Chlomo managed to stay together, surviving forced labour and a death march to another concentration camp, Buchenwald, near Weimar. Chlomo died there in January 1945, three months before the 6th Armored Division of the United States Army arrived to liberate the camp.
Synopsis
Night opens in Sighet in 1941. The book's narrator is Eliezer, an Orthodox Jewish teenager who studies the Talmud by day, and by night "weep[s] over the destruction of the Temple". To the disapproval of his father, Eliezer spends time discussing the Kabbalah with Moshe the Beadle, caretaker of the Hasidic shtiebel (house of prayer).
In June 1941 the Hungarian government expelled Jews unable to prove their citizenship. Moshe is crammed onto a cattle train and taken to Poland. He manages to escape, saved by God, he believes, so that he might save the Jews of Sighet. He returns to the village to tell what he calls the "story of his own death", running from one house to the next: "Jews, listen to me! It's all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!"
When the train crossed into Poland, he tells them, it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were transferred to trucks, then driven to a forest in Galicia, near Kolomay, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole, present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. He tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen, making Moshe Night's first unheeded witness.; .
The Germans arrived in Sighet around 21 March 1944, and shortly after Passover (8–14 April that year) arrested the community leaders. Jews had to hand over their valuables, were not allowed to visit restaurants or leave home after six in the evening, and had to wear the yellow star at all times. Eliezer's father makes light of it:
The SS transfer the Jews to one of two ghettos, each with its own council or Judenrat, which appoints Jewish police; there is also an office for social assistance, a labor committee, and a hygiene department. Eliezer's house, on a corner of Serpent Street, is in the larger ghetto in the town centre, so his family can stay in their home, although the windows on the non-ghetto side have to be boarded up. He is happy at first: "We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. ... The general opinion was that we were going to remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Then everything would be as before. It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto—it was illusion."
In May 1944 the Judenrat is told the ghettos will be closed with immediate effect and the residents deported. Eliezer's family is moved at first to the smaller ghetto, but they are not told their final destination, only that they may each take a few personal belongings. The Hungarian police, wielding truncheons and rifle butts, march Eliezer's neighbours through the streets. "It was from that moment that I began to hate them, and my hate is still the only link between us today."
Eliezer and his family are among the 80 people crammed into a closed cattle wagon. On the third night one woman, Madame Schächter—Night's second unheeded witness—starts screaming that she can see flames, until the others beat her. Men and women are separated on arrival at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp within the Auschwitz complex. Eliezer and his father are "selected" to go to the left, which meant forced labour; his mother, Hilda, Beatrice and Tzipora to the right, the gas chamber. (Hilda and Beatrice managed to survive.)
The remainder of Night describes Eliezer's efforts not to be parted from his father, not even to lose sight of him; his grief and shame at witnessing his father's decline into helplessness; and as their relationship changes and the young man becomes the older man's caregiver, his resentment and guilt, because his father's existence threatens his own. The stronger Eliezer's need to survive, the weaker the bonds that tie him to other people.
His loss of faith in human relationships is mirrored in his loss of faith in God. During the first night, as he and his father wait in line, he watches a lorry deliver its load of children's bodies into the fire. While his father recites the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead—Wiesel writes that in the long history of the Jews, he does not know whether people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves—Eliezer considers throwing himself against the electric fence. At that moment he and his father are ordered to go to their barracks. But Eliezer is already destroyed. "[T]he student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me." There follows a passage that Ellen Fine writes contains the main themes of Night—the death of God and innocence, and the défaite du moi (dissolution of self), a recurring motif in Holocaust literature:.
With the loss of self goes Eliezer's sense of time: "I glanced at my father. How he had changed! ... So much had happened within such a few hours that I had lost all sense of time. When had we left our houses? And the ghetto? And the train? Was it only a week? One night – one single night?"; .
In or around August 1944 Eliezer and his father are transferred from Birkenau to the work camp at Monowitz (known as Buna or Auschwitz III), their lives reduced to the avoidance of violence and the search for food. Their only joy is when the Americans bomb the camp. God is not lost to Eliezer entirely. During the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear.
Fine writes that this is the central event in Night, a religious sacrifice—the binding of Isaac and crucifixion of Jesus—described by Alfred Kazin as the literal death of God., citing Alfred Kazin, Contemporaries, Little, Brown & Co, 1962, 297. Afterwards the inmates celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, but Eliezer cannot take part: "Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled ... How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? ... But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused."; .