Night by Elie Wiesel

Night

The story �Night’ is non-fiction record of Elie Wiesels life during his time at the concentration camps. It is a memoir that captures Elies fears, hopes, growth, and despair with himself and his family. Though Minor details have been altered, what happens to Eliezer is what happened to Wiesel himself during the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel faces many internal struggles in his life in such a short time frame; not only does he have to fight to keep himself, but he spent a great deal of energy taking care of his father. He became sick and was considered “useless,” Elie knew he would have been killed for his weakness, so in a sense they traded roles with one another.

During his first arrival in Birkenau, men and women were seperated from one another, so Elie and his father are separated from his mother and sisters. By the end of the story we realize that they never see each other again. In the first of many “selections” that Elie describes in the memoir, the Jews are evaluated to determine whether which should be killed and which could be used for work at the camps. He and his father luckily passed the evaluation, but had the unpleasant task of witnessing the burning of babies from heartless Nazis.

When all Jewish prisoners arrived, they were stripped, disinfected, and had their heads shaved. They were treated cruel and were forced to march to Auschwitz; the real camp where they will be staying.

Elie ended up working in an electrical-fittings factory. But since he was still a slave, working conditions were still bad, he was severely malnourished and their were still frequent “selections.”. Their was a pert in the book where a foreman forces Elie to give him his gold tooth, which was eventually pried out of his mouth with a rusty spoon.

In a way to scare the prisoners, they were forced to watch the hanging of fellow prisoners in the camp courtyard. Elie remembered the hanging of a small child. Because of the bad conditions in the camps and the danger of constant worry of being killed, many of the prisoners themselves begin to become cruel and hateful. This was a way to insure their own personal survival. Sons begin to abandon and abuse their fathers. Their was even a scene where food was thrown in the camps by towns people and they watched as a boy beat his father for it.