Night Elie Wiesel Summary

Eliezer and his father got separated from his mother and younger sisters. For months in the concentration camps, Eliezer witnessed inhumane doings that scarred him for the rest of his life. He was forced to work at Buna, a factory, and run on a daily basis to keep himself alive. He became malnourished because of the unappetizing food that they served. He and other Jews were punished and beaten for no reason.

This novel takes place in 1941 during one of the most devastating time periods in the world; the holocaust. Night is based on one boy's journey through a genocide, we see his struggle to survive and struggle to remain believing in his all benevolent God. Eli is twelve years old and the one narrating the story. He begins by telling us about his family which consist of; his father, his mother, and his three sisters, two older and one younger than him. Elie describes his hometown Sighet in Transylvania, how he grew up a studious, happy, and religious boy there.

Unlike the ones who surround him, Eliezer escaped the fate of turning into an animal and is shown in his relationship with his father when the prisoners are sent to run and he doesn’t leave his father like Rabbi Eliahu’s son, when he runs after his father as he is sent to the left during selection, and when he gives his father his rations of coffee and soup because he is not given anything. In the book Night, prisoners are evacuated from their prisons and sent by foot to other prisons due to the Russians who were going to liberate the prisoners. During this they have to run the whole way so the Nazis can keep their prisoners, many prisoners start to fall behind because of the distance and their bodies. A Rabbi ends up to be one of these prisoners who starts to fall behind and when they get to the other prison he looks for his son.

“Every few yards, there stood an SS man, his machine gun trained on us. Hand in hand we followed the throng.” ( pg. 29) Eliezer's instinct for survival outweighs everything else. Although Eliezer and his family did not want to go to Auschwitz, they went because they were threatened if they did not comply. The SS guards would have killed anyone who did not follow orders, so they left their home and everything they have every known in order to survive.

He describes his parents as shopkeepers and that he has one younger and two older sisters. Eliezer describes his interest in the Jewish religion and how Moishe becomes his teacher of Jewish faith and mysticism. Then he describes the deportation of Moishe as a “foreign Jew” out of the village and his subsequent return where he tells of Jews being massacred and his own escape but is not believed by the villagers. He describes how the Jews in Eliezer’s hometown basically scoffed at Hitler’s public desire to exterminate Jews from Germany which hints at the denial that was alive and well at that time. Multiple reports of the atrocities that were befalling Jews were brought to the town but were not taken seriously and did not prompt them to flee.

Eliezer;s story being in Sighet, Transylvania. The book then follows his journey through several concentration camps in Europe. Auschwitz,buna,Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. Eliezer’s struggle to mation faith in a benevolent god, silence, inhumanity towards other people and the importance of dad and son bonds are. There was a rumor that the German Secret Police were taking away jews to kill them, no one really believed it, until the first deportees were taken away.

The journey to Buchenwald fatally weakened Eliezer’s father, Wiesel describes his father as seeming at last to have “given in to death”. Eliezer’s father is ill with dysentery, doctors will not treat him, and the prisoners whose beds surround Eliezer’s father’s bed steal his food and beat him. All of this causes Eliezer stress, he is guilty about his father and doesn’t know whether to help him, or leave him and focus on his own survival. The head block reminded Wiesel that he was at a concentration camp and that in order to survive, he had to think of only himself and leave his father behind. On the morning of January 29th, 1945, Eliezer discovers that his father in not in his bed.

Eliezer questioned his faith in God, he never understood how such a fatality could happen and why. The one person Eliezer trusted was Hitler because everything Hitler said he made happen. Eliezer said the holocaust “murdered his God” Eliezer had always had faith the holocaust challenged his faith and connection with God. Elizer witnessed major horrors in the camp that was forever burned into his memory. Eliezer's faith in God came and went, but his faith to live stayed with him.

Decades after surviving the Holocaust, Eliezer revisits the concentration camps and Auschwitz with Oprah for an interview in 2006, and is reminded that “If [he] survived this place until Buchenwald, it was because [his] father was alive, and [Eliezer] knew that if [he] died, [his father] would die” (Winfrey). This event changes Eliezer’s perspective on life, as he can realize that as long as he has someone or something worth living for, he will, unlike those who have lost all hope and reasons to live, keep living. Many of those had no motivation would not make it out of concentration camps alive, as his father and others who had lost hope did

After a very long horrid train ride of Mrs. Schächter “prophesizing” about seeing flames, the Jews of Sighet arrive at Birkenau where they are separated by gender. Elie and his father are now on their own. 4. With the fear of the first selection behind them, Elie and the other man are sent to the showers, and assigned to a barrack, A while later, all the men are transferred to Auschwitz. Elie and his father are given block 17 to stay in.

Summary In 1944, Elie Wiesel spends much time on Jewish mysticism. His teacher, Moshe the Beadle, returns from almost dyeing warns that the Nazi will soon threaten that they we kill ever single Jew here. To move Jews, the Nazis force the Jews into supervised ghettos. Through all of the moving, Elie's family remains calm.

(Wiesel 112). Eliezer is sad when his father dies, but is more relieved because he can take care of himself now. Another way Eliezer is dehumanized mentally is through his religion. Before he was sent to the concentration camps, Eliezer believed God always knew best. But as the memoir goes on, Eliezer loses his faith.

Eliezer has to learn how to adapt to not having as food as he used to, being beaten for no reason, and watching daily hangings. Eliezer specifically remembers one particular hanging of a young boy, a pipel, whose master has been gathered arms for the resistance. Eliezer said “But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… ” Eliezer remembers how the child cried and remained alive for the next half an hour, before his body finally gives out and the child dies. Towards the end of the book, as the group that Eliezer and his father are in keeps running around Germany, and Eliezer has a choice to give up and die on the side of a road, but he continues to run because of his father. Eliezer says “My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me.

He is Jewish, but he wants to go deeper into his religion and learn more about it. He becomes good friends with a man named Moishe the Beadle. Moishe is very knowledgeable about the religion and he teaches Eliezer a lot. Times passes, and soon Jews are being forced to move into ghettos. The ghettos are where they are to stay until they are evacuated from their towns to go somewhere else.

“I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son”(42). When Eliezer arrives at Auschwitz, the separation of his family puts an emotional toll on his father since he realizes that only him and Eliezer are still alive. This will be a catalyst to their relationship becoming stronger as they endure more together. Elie Wiesel, the author of the novel Night writes his own personal accounts of experiencing the Holocaust through the character Eliezer.