Night by Eliezer Wiesel

Night

The holocaust was a time when Jews were prosecuted by the Nazis under Hitler’s rule in the years 1933-1945. People who survived the holocaust speak of what they went through; others tell their story through writing. Eliezer Wiesel (Elie) a survivor of the holocaust and he told his story through a book called “Night”. Night is about what Elie lived and thought during Word War II. He speaks of what he felt during the time when little by little he was being moved into one concentration camp into another. Night is a powerful book that contains unbelievable truth. What makes it unbelievable is how Elie writes it, describing it deeply so you can picture what is going on in each scene.

In the beginning Elie describes how the townspeople remained complacent despite the advance of the German army because in the spring of 1944 there was good news from the Russian front. Thinking that the Russians were going to defend them and defeat the Germans in a couple of months or weeks they did not worry. Months passed and things started to get worse. The movement of the Nazis increased leading to the beginning of what Elie calls “Night”.

In the book Elie describes dehumanization in many places for example when he wrote what Moshe the Beadle had seen, “Babies were thrown into the air and the machine gunners used them as targets”. This sentence gives the readers a quick picture how humans were treated as things and not treated as a human should be treated by comparing babies as targets. “You must get completely undressed... Run as if the devil were after you! Don’t look at the SS. Run, straight in front of you!” is another example of dehumanization. In this part of the book Jews were ordered to strip and run in order to pass a test for survival. This is an example of how Elie, his father and his fellow Jews were humiliated. A final example of how Elie and other Jews were dehumanized was when they were asked to leave their homes and were moved into the ghetto “Faster! I had no strength left. The journey had only just begun, and I felt so weak...” They had little time to pack their most precious belongings and move out before something worse happened; they were taken out of their own homes into the streets.

Being in the concentration camp for many years began to change people’s attitudes even Elies. In the book there was a scene in where Elie’s father was beaten by Idek, a kapo and at the end Elie says “I was angry with him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak. That is what concentration camp life had made of me.” Concentration life had changed Eliezer’s attitude because he cared so much for his father and when this incident