Elie Wiesel's Novel Night

Nights come so often. However, the darkest of nights are the nights that engrave themselves into our subconscious. No matter how hard you try to forget, it is impossible. The Holocaust, as it is remembered, was yet another monstrous aspect of the Second World War. Adolf Hitler conducted the mass genocide of eleven million people, six million of them being Jewish. The Holocaust lasted from January of 1933 and continued until May of 1945. The novel Night captures the occurrences that were faced by author Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor during his time at Auschwitz. Wiesel transported his readers to Nazi Germany with him through Night.

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, the modern day Romania.

The Nazi’s were generous with their punishments, towards all the men in camp. Men would get lashed if they stepped out of line in anyway. Only three weeks into their time at Auschwitz, the men were forced to march ten miles to Buna, a brother concentration camp where they would endure another lot of soldiers. Elie’s father and he fell into bad health from dehydration and malnutrition. "I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Wiesel 50). Russian invaders heard word of the camps and the Nazi’s were forced to march the men forty-two miles to Gleiwitz in the bitter fallen snow. Elie’s foot ends up infected and wounded, but he would not let that falter him and let the soldiers kill him. His father’s health had fallen worse and worse since Buna, and Elie just prayed for him to hold on. Once in Gleiwitz, the prisoners are living on nothing but handfuls of snow. Most that were in Buna did not survive the forty-two mile journey. With the war coming to an end, the few remaining men are transported to Central Germany to Buchenwald, to avoid American and Russian invaders. When they arrive in Buchenwald, Elie tries to nurse his father back to health, however the dying man succumbs to dysentery with already being malnourished. Even with his health, the soldiers would viciously beat him forcing him

This novel can be used in positive ways to educate readers on the true max of the barbarian acts that prisoners faced in the concentration camps. Prisoners were treated like what Nazi Germany viewed them as- garbage. Night did not sugar coat the events that the soldiers put the prisoners through. Everyone hears of the mass genocide, however, the in-between torture before reaching the gas chambers is gruesome in itself. Elie Wiesel was brave to share his life in the concentration camps, so that we all can really understand to the extent we are able