Chapter 1 "They called him Moché the BeadleŠ"

Summary:

Night opens with a brief description of a poor man named Moché the Beadle, who lives in the narrator's hometown of Sighet, Transylvania (modern-day Romania; at the time that the novel opens, the town is under Hungarian control). Moché is generally well liked, works in the Hasidic synagogue, and is a very pious and humble individual. In 1941, when he is twelve, the narrator, Eliezer Wiesel, wants to study the cabbala (a form of Jewish mysticism), but his father tells him that he is too young. In this passage we learn that Eliezer's father is highly regarded in the Jewish community and pays more attention to outside matters than to family ones; we also learn that Eliezer has two older sisters, Hilda and Béa, and a younger one, Tzipora. Despite his father's lack of support, Eliezer decides to study the cabbala anyway and chooses Moché as his teacher. Moché teaches him not to search for answers from God, but rather to try to ask the right questions. One day Moché and other non-Hungarian Jews are deported by Hungarian police, but the incident is forgotten by the other Jews and dismissed as a normal wartime practice.

Several months later, Moché returns, having escaped from a concentration camp in Poland. He tries to warn the townspeople of the atrocities that he has seen, but no one believes him. Everyone thinks he is trying to win sympathy or has simply gone insane. He tells Eliezer that he miraculously survived the concentration camps in order to save the Jews in Sighet, but life continues on as normal during 1942 and 1943. Eliezer devotes himself to his religious studies, his father busies himself in the Jewish community, and his mother tries to find a husband for Hilda.

In the spring of 1944, people believe that the Germans will soon be defeated by the Russians, and no one believes that the Nazis could want to exterminate an entire race of people. The Jews do not really consider that anything bad could happen to them, and even though Eliezer asks his father to emigrate to Palestine, his father does not want to start a new life elsewhere. Even after the townspeople hear that the Fascists have come into power in Hungary, no one really worries until the Germans actually invade Hungary and arrive at Sighet itself. Even then, the Germans seem nice and friendly, at least until Passover, when the persecution of the Jews begins in full force. Jews are not allowed to leave their homes, are forced to give up their valuables, and are required to wear the yellow star. Next, two ghettos are set up, and everyone is relocated. Once again, however, life returns to "normal," with the Jews setting up organizations and socializing happily.

One day Eliezer's father is suddenly summoned to a meeting of the Jewish council. Family and neighbors wait up past midnight to hear whatever news Eliezer's father has to tell them. When he returns from the meeting, he tells them that all the Jews are to be deported to an unknown destination and that they will only be allowed one bag per person. Eliezer and the neighbors disperse to pack and wake everyone else up. Someone from outside the ghetto knocks on the door, but disappears before the door can be opened. Later, Eliezer discovers that it was a family friend in the Hungarian police trying to warn them to escape.

Eliezer goes to wake up some of his father's friends, and then everyone cooks and packs in preparation to being deported. When the Hungarian police arrive early in the morning and begin forcing people outside into the streets, it is very hot and people are crying out for water. Eliezer and his sisters help the Jewish police to secretly bring water to thirsty children. When it is time for the people in the street to leave, there is joy because at this point people cannot imagine anything more horrible than sitting outside in the hot sun. Eliezer is scheduled to leave in the last transport, and he watches people in the first group march by. The next day, his family is moved from the large ghetto to the small one. Eliezer feels nothing as he looks at the house he grew up in, but his father begins to weep. At this point Eliezer begins to hate his oppressors, and he calls his hate the only thing that still connects him to them today.

In the little ghetto, which is unguarded, people try to remain upbeat. Eliezer's family moves into the house formerly occupied by his uncle's family, and everything is in disarray, as if people were suddenly and unexpectedly driven out. An old, non-Jewish servant named Martha comes to visit and tries to get the family to escape and hide in her village. Eliezer's father refuses to go and tells Eliezer he can go if he wants to. Eliezer refuses to leave his family, and they all remain in the ghetto.

It is night, and everyone goes to bed because there is nothing else to do but wait. When they wake at dawn, they are foolishly optimistic and compare the deportation to going on holiday. Eliezer says that the false optimism helped pass the time and notes that the uncertainty of everyone's future erased social distinctions between people. On Friday, the night before the scheduled deportation, the family eats dinner together for the last time. The next day, the Jews are ready to leave. They had agreed to organize their own deportation voluntarily, and they are all crowded into the synagogue for an entire day. No one can leave, and people are relieving themselves in corners. The following morning, everyone is herded into cattle wagons, which are sealed shut. The Gestapo puts one person in charge of each car and threatens to shoot him if anyone escapes. A whistle blows, and the train starts moving.

Analysis

In this chapter we learn how important religion is to the young Eliezer. Though his father thinks that he is too young to immerse himself in religious mysticism, Eliezer is very devout and focuses all his energy on religious study. As a young boy, religion comes as naturally to Eliezer as living and breathing, and we should pay attention to how his attitude towards religion and God changes as Night progresses. In the first few pages of the chapter, Moché tells Eliezer that one must seek to ask God the right questions, not to find out the right answers. One simply cannot understand the answers that God gives: "You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!" This advice proves to be one of the main themes of the book. While in concentration camps, Eliezer cannot understand why God is allowing so much death and destruction to take place around him. However, even though he is angry and questions God's actions, he never loses his faith. Though he doesn't come up with any answers, he continues to question God, and in doing so, his faith is actually strengthened. Eliezer's evolving relationship with God is a major source of character development in the novel.

Another important theme in the novel concerns the inadvertent role that the Jews played in their own destruction. In the first section of the book, Eliezer is haunted by the complacency and foolish optimism of the Jews in Sighet. Despite Moché's warnings, news of the German invasion of Hungary, and even imminent deportation, the Jewish people refuse to believe that anything bad will happen to them. As long as possible, they try to maintain life as normal and even cast a positive light on their situation. For example, when the Jews are forced to move into ghettos, the townspeople act relieved that they no longer have to deal with overt prejudice: "We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothersŠ" Of course, it is not an improvement for the Jews to be thus segregated, and such passages would be ironic, were they not so tragic. Eliezer reveals how naïve and trusting the Jews were, and he is obviously haunted by how his own family could have easily escaped the horrors of the concentration camps simply by leaving town a little bit earlier.

Though the innocence of the Jewish townspeople is painfully foolish in retrospect, Eliezer does not fault his family and neighbors for being so reluctant to leave Sighet. Although his narrative is filled with regret and a little guilt, he is careful to point out that the optimism of the Jewish townspeople is simply a survival strategy: "These optimistic speeches, which no one believed, helped to pass the time." The Jews must keep up hope if they want to survive; to give up in despair and to lose faith in God is to die. Eliezer will learn this lesson well as he gains time in concentration camps.

While this first section of the novel focuses on how the Jews inadvertently participated in their own deportation to concentration camps, later sections will describe how they actively helped destroy each other while imprisoned by the Nazis. Forced under desperate conditions to try to survive, many of them will turn on each other with violence and cruelty. In addition, they will learn to bear things they had never imagined possible, such as the sight of their friends and family being beaten by those in authority. Throughout the novel Wiesel is exploring two variations on the same time: how people react in the face of terrible circumstances. Before deportation and in concentration camps, the Jews are put under extreme pressures and behave in ways that they generally wouldn't under normal circumstances. For this reason, the novel can be seen as a kind of psychological study in human behavior. However, Night is far from a coldly objective and distanced analysis of human psychology. Instead, it is a painful and intimate autobiography, and the two emotions that resonate most strongly within it are Eliezer's anger at the Nazis for violating his humanity and that of his people, and guilt that he was able to behave so inhumanely as a result.

Night is a novel full of symbolism, and in this chapter Eliezer uses the word "night" repeatedly. Night is approaching, night has fallen, Eliezer and his family lie awake at night. Night functions as both a metaphor and a symbol. It is a metaphor for the Holocaust, which will submerge Eliezer's family and thousands of other Jewish families in the darkness and misery of concentration camps. Eliezer will be thrust into a world with no light and no hope, and everything around him will seem as black as night. For example, this passage comes right before Eliezer's family is deported: "Night. No one prayed, so that the night would pass quickly. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes." As it becomes closer and closer to the time that Eliezer's family is to be deported, night represents the increasing desperateness and fear that he is experiencing. Night also symbolizes the evil and destructiveness of the Nazis. The world that Eliezer describes becomes darker and darker, with an increased emphasis on night instead of day, as the Nazis draw closer to Sighet. Eliezer's world literally becomes plunged in darkness because the Nazis take away all the joy, light, and hope, replacing it with the blackness of death and evil.

In the first section of the book, there is an almost obsessive quality to Wiesel's description of night and day. He recounts every single dusk, night, and dawn from the time that the Germans invade Sighet to the time that he is taken away by train. This focus on the sleep cycle emphasizes the hours the Jews spent waiting for their uncertain future, and it successfully recreates the feeling of days dragging on endlessly yet inexorably. Eliezer cannot stop time, and by marking it in intervals in his novel, he increases the sense of impending doom. And ironically, though the days seem drawn out and monotonous, everything happens in a very short time span and their lives change almost instantaneously.

Chapter 2 "Lying down was out of the questionŠ"

Summary:

It is so crowded inside the cattle wagon that people have to take turns to sit down. They travel for two days, and the heat, crowding, and lack of food and drink is becoming unbearable. Social constraints become stripped away, and young people openly have sex, with everyone pretending not to notice. The wagons stop at Kaschau, a town on the Czechoslovak frontier, and everyone realizes that they will not be staying in Hungary as expected. A German officer explains to them that they are now under the authority of the German army. He takes all their valuables and threatens to shoot everybody in a wagon if even a single person escapes.

A fifty-year-old woman named Madamae Schaechter is on the train with her ten-year-old son. She had been separated from her husband and two older sons earlier and is now beginning to lose her mind. She starts screaming hysterically about a fire and a furnace that she claims to see in the distance. At first, she terrifies the people in her wagon, and they rush to see what she is pointing at out the window. After hours of her screaming, the people on the train can take no more, and they tie her up, gag her, and begin beating her to make her stop screaming about the fire. She breaks free from her restraints and periodically screams throughout the night, until everyone else on the train feels like they are about to go mad too. Finally, the wagons arrive at Auschwitz, which they are told is a labor camp where conditions are good. People's spirits lift, although Madame Schaechter continues to scream. As the train pulls into the camp, everyone suddenly sees the flames and chimney that Madame Schaechter had prophesied. When her vision finally materializes, Madame Schaechter becomes silent. Everyone is forced to get out of the train, amidst the smell of burning flesh. They are at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz.

Analysis

In this section of the novel, we catch our first glimpse of how human behavior changes when people are placed in extreme circumstances. After being confined in a small, cramped wagon with no food, water, or sanitation, the young people submit to their animal instincts and copulate without even considering the people around them. If people are not respected as individuals within society and are instead treated as animals, as the Jews are, then they will begin to act as animals, without regard to the usual social conventions and responsibilities. In addition to the physical torture and extermination that the Nazis submitted the Jews to, it is this kind of mental and psychological torture that may have proved most damaging to Holocaust survivors. Through a variety of methods that will be detailed in coming sections of the book, the Nazis denied the Jews (and other inhabitants of the concentration camps) their humanity and led them to behave in crude, brutal, and uncivilized ways. Confined in small spaces and denied their individuality, the Jews become anonymous beings concerned solely with their own survival. They were no longer people to the Nazis, and unable to prove that they were not simply animals, they began to act as if they were.

Another striking example of this theme occurs with the people's treatment of Madame Schaechter. Though she is a fifty-year-old woman and obviously unwell, she is beaten repeatedly about the head by young men trying to silence her. And her little boy says nothing: "They struck her several times on the head‹blows that might have killed her. Her little boy clung to her; he did not cry out; he did not say a word. He was not even weeping now." The people in the wagon treat her cruelly and inhumanely, as they undoubtedly would not have done under normal circumstances, but Wiesel does not condemn them for their brutal actions. Instead, his tone in this passage is very sad, full of regret and guilt. Since Madame Schaechter's hysterical shrieks was unnerving everyone in the car, he recognizes that it was necessary for their collective survival that she be silenced. At the same time, however, he seems to mourn the fact that such cruel behavior was necessary and that everyone, including the woman's own son, condoned such violent and vicious behavior. In this nightmare world that the Nazis have created for the Jews, survival is the only concern, and human emotions and affective ties become irrelevant.

Silence is an important theme in Night. In the first section Wiesel is preoccupied with how silent and complacent the pre-deportation Jews are and how they quietly and unknowingly go straight to their doom. The Jews do not believe anything bad can happen to them, they do not despair, and they quietly pass up on opportunities to escape. In this section, however, the silence (and generally quiet tone of the novel) is violently shattered by the hysterical screaming of Madame Schaechter. Her violent shrieks are what finally destroy the trusting naivete of the Jews and begin to make them afraid of what is to happen to them: "The heat, the thirst, the pestilential stench, the suffocating lack of air‹these were as nothing compared with these screams which tore us to shreds. A few days more and we should all have started to scream too." Her screaming symbolizes the hellish world of insanity that they have entered into, as opposed to the world of calm, quiet, and security that they have just left behind.

When the caravan arrives at Auschwitz, they receive news that is horribly false: "There was a labor camp. Conditions were good. Families would not be split up. Only the young people would go to work in the factories. The old men and invalids would be kept occupied in the fields." As they will soon discover, Auschwitz is one of the most notorious of the Nazi death-camps. This passage is an example of dramatic irony because the characters think one thing while the reader knows what is actually true.

Chapter 3 "The cherished objects we had brought with usŠ"

Summary:

The men and women are separated, and Eliezer sees his mother and sisters vanishing in the distance. He holds onto his father and is determined not to lose him. A fellow prisoner tells Eliezer to say that he is eighteen (though he is really fourteen) and that his father is forty (though he is fifty). The prisoners who have been at Auschwitz for awhile are brutal and cruel to the new arrivals, and one of them tells them about the crematory. Some of the young men talk about revolting but are silenced by their elders. Then, everyone is forced to march past SS officer Dr. Mengele, who uses a baton to pick out who will remain alive and who will go to the crematory. Dr. Mengele looks cruel yet intelligent, and Eliezer tells him that he is eighteen and a farmer. Eliezer and his father are placed in the same group, which they are informed is the one destined for the crematory. Eliezer watches in horror as a truck full of children drives up to a giant, fiery ditch and the children are put into the flames. Eliezer's father is sad that he is going to see his only son consumed by fire, and he tells Eliezer that humanity is not present in the concentration camps. As the parade of men starts to recite the prayer for the dead for themselves and his father begins to weep, for the first time Eliezer feels himself revolt against God. The men march closer and closer to a fiery ditch, but at the last minute, they swerve away from the fiery ditch. Eliezer says he will never forget that night and the children's faces that he saw burned in flames. On that night his faith was consumed, and the silence of the night made him lose his will to live.

At the barracks, veteran prisoners began to beat the new arrivals and told them to get undressed. The new prisoners threw their clothes into a huge pile. SS officers selected strong men who were taken to work in the crematories. The new arrivals were then taken to the barber, where all their body hair was shaved off. People began to greet friends and relatives and were filled with joy to see the people who were still alive. Eliezer tells a friend not to waste his energy crying, and he feels his fear vanishing and being replaced by "an inhuman weariness." Everyone feels numb and without any sort of emotion, and Eliezer describes them as "damned souls wandering the half-world." At five in the morning, the prisoners are then made to run naked to a different barracks where they are doused in petrol and hot water as disinfectant and then given clothes. At this point the prisoners have ceased to be men. Eliezer feels that the person he was has been destroyed and cannot believe that he has only been at the camp for a single night.

The prisoners are taken to a new barracks, the "gypsies' camp," and made to stand for hours in the mud. Eliezer falls asleep standing up, and Kapos (prisoners in charge of barracks) come in repeatedly looking for new shoes. Eliezer manages to keep his shoes because they are caked in mud and not visible. Finally, an SS officer comes in and lectures them, telling that they must choose between work and the crematory. The unskilled workers (including Eliezer and his father) are taken to a new barracks, where they are allowed to sit down. Eliezer's father asks the gypsy in charge where the lavatory is and is knocked viciously to the ground. Eliezer does nothing and will never forgive the Nazis for making him passively watch his father being beaten. The prisoners then march to Auschwitz, where they must strip, run, and shower again. A plaque at Auschwitz reads "Work is liberty." Conditions are better at Auschwitz than at Birkenau, and the prisoner in charge of their block speaks to them humanely and kindly. He tells them to keep faith and lets them to finally go to bed.

The next day seems almost pleasant: they are given new clothes and coffee, and the veteran prisoners treat them kindly. At lunch Eliezer refuses to eat his ration, a plate of thick soup. The prisoners rest in the sun and talk with each other. In the afternoon they have identification numbers tattooed on their left arms. Eliezer becomes A-7713. At dusk there is roll call, and all the prisoners line up in ranks as their numbers are checked. For three weeks the prisoners follow a set routine of morning coffee, soup, roll call, bread, and sleep. Eliezer and his father meet a distant relative, Stein of Antwerp, who wants news of his wife Reizel and his children. Eliezer's father does not recognize the man since he was generally more interested in community matters in his old life, and Eliezer lies to the man, telling him that his family is doing well. Stein weeps with joy at the news. He continues to visit them for the next few weeks and occasionally brings them extra bread. He is thin and dried up, but he says that he is kept alive by the thought that his family is still alive. When a transport arrives from Antwerp, however, he discovers the truth about his family, and Eliezer never sees Stein again.

In the evenings the prisoners sing Hasidic melodies and discuss religion and God. Akiba Drumer in particular has a beautiful voice and is very devout. At this point Eliezer stops praying. Although he still believes in God, he now doubts his absolute justice. Eliezer and his father pretend that the rest of the family is still alive in the concentration camp. After three weeks, all the unskilled laborers left in the camp (including Eliezer and his father) are rounded up to be transported to another camp. They take a four-hour march to their new home, Buna.

Analysis

In this section, Eliezer and the other prisoners are fully exposed to the horrible inhumanity of the Nazis. Due to the brutal methods of the Nazis, they are transformed from respected individuals into obedient, animal-like automatons. How does this transformation take place? When the prisoners first arrive at the camp, some of the young men want to rebel: "We've got to do something. We can't let ourselves be killed. We can't go like beasts to the slaughter. We've got to revolt." Despite these early feelings of rebellion, the prisoners rapidly become docile and fearful, and they follow the rules set out by the Nazi authorities. Why do they obey people who are so obviously intent on destroying them?

The answer to that question is very complex. First, the Nazis make it very clear to their prisoners that they hold the power of life and death over them. When the prisoners arrive, they are made to think that they are all going to die in the fiery ditch, and they are periodically beaten and abused by the SS guards. Then their individual identities are completely erased when they are shaved, doused in petrol, and given identical, ill-fitting clothing. They are denied any sort of personality whatsoever, and the only way to deal with the constant abuse is to shut down all human emotions: "Our senses were blunted; everything was blurred as in a fog. It was no longer possible to grasp anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had deserted usŠ.Within a few seconds, we had ceased to be men." Treated as animals, the prisoners know that the Nazis will have no qualms at destroying them. For this reason, it makes logical sense to obey the Nazis' commands.

At the same time, however, the prisoners must have faith that they will survive the horrors of the concentration camp. When the young men think of revolting, their elders tell them, "You must never lose faith, even when the sword hangs over your head. That's the teaching of our sagesŠ" In addition, the head of Eliezer's block kindly offers advice to his new charges: "We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves." In order to survive, the prisoners must believe that survival is possible‹that death is not an inevitability and that individual strength will allow one to escape the Nazi crematories. Denied their individuality by their captors, the prisoners must nevertheless struggle to maintain their individual faith in God.

However, it is difficult to have faith in God when one is constantly surrounded by death and inhumanity. As Eliezer approaches the fiery pit, he feels anger towards a God who allows Nazi inhumanity to exist in this world: "For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?" Although the only way to survive the concentration camps is to have faith that God will see you through, it is nearly impossible to believe in a God who allows concentration camps to exist in the first place.

At this point in the narrative, the prisoners have not been completely broken down yet, and they still recognize the value of human relationship. For Stein of Antwerp, just thinking that his wife and children are still alive is enough to make him want to live also. Similarly, Eliezer and his father hope that Tzipora and her mother have survived also. Other human beings give people a reason for strength and hope and make them want to survive. The prisoners are still able to consider people other than themselves and retain a human concern for family and friends. However, the Nazis will later succeed in destroying the humanity of their prisoners so that affective ties between family and friends become virtually meaningless.

In this section Wiesel continues to develop the symbolic meaning of the title Night. After describing the fiery ditch and the truck full of children consumed in flames, Wiesel writes: "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little face of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky." Upon arriving at Auschwitz, Eliezer enters into a world of eternal nightmares and hellish visions. Both day and night are filled with horrors and evil, and night itself is no longer restful, but instead representative of the continual, creeping Nazi menace. Even after leaving the concentration camps, Wiesel is haunted by the nightmarish visions he saw at Auschwitz, and even day seems threatening and dark.

Chapter 4 "The camp looked as though it had suffered an epidemicŠ"

Summary:

The leader of the camp and the head of Eliezer's tent both take a special interest in children and give them extra food. Eliezer explains that children are traded among homosexuals at the camp. When Eliezer arrives at the camp, it seems empty. As usual, the prisoners shower and are given new clothes. Veteran prisoners tell them that Buna is a good camp and that they should try to avoid being placed in the building unit. The head of Eliezer's tent is a fat and predatory-looking German. His assistant tries to get Eliezer's shoes by offering to put him and his father in the same unit, but Eliezer refuses, even after he offers an extra ration of food. The shoes are taken from him anyway. After a medical examination, Eliezer is randomly put in the orchestra block and befriends some musicians, who tell him that he has been placed in a good unit. All he has to do is count bolts and bulbs in an electrical warehouse, and he gets his father transferred to his unit. The only real hazard is Idek, the Kapo, who sometimes flies into violent rages. Eliezer befriends two Czech brothers named Yossi and Tibi. He hums Zionist chants and discusses Palestine with them, and they all plan to leave Europe as soon as they are liberated.

In this chapter Eliezer recounts a number of incidents that stand out in his memory. Each episode is brief, and the narrative is somewhat fragmented. The head of the orchestra block is a Jew named Alphonse who sometimes gives them extra soup. Once Eliezer is summoned to the dentist to have his gold crown removed, but he feigns illness two times and eventually gets to keep it. The dentist's surgery is shut down because the dentist is to be hanged for extorting some of the gold he extracted from patients. Eliezer plans to use his crown to buy bread and describes how his life had become focused around his stomach and food.

One day the Kapo, Idek, flies into a rage and starts beating Eliezer. A French girl who passes as Aryan comforts him in German, and many years later, Eliezer sees her again in Paris. She admits that she actually is Jewish and had false papers at the camp and that the only time she spoke German at the camp was to him.

Another day his father is beaten with an iron bar for working slowly, and Eliezer feels anger directed at his father only, for not knowing how to avoid the abuse. Then, Franek the foreman demands Eliezer's gold crown and begins abusing his father for two weeks when Eliezer refuses to give it to him. Franek torments Eliezer's father daily for marching out of time, and Eliezer tries to help his father practice marching, but his efforts are to no avail. Finally, Eliezer surrenders his gold crown. After first taking away his rations, Franek starts to give Eliezer extra soup. After a fortnight, however, all the Poles (including Franek) are transferred out of the camp.

On another day Eliezer walks in on Idek having sex with a girl. Knowing that Idek moved all the prisoners to a different building for this specific reason, Eliezer bursts out laughing. Later, he receives twenty-five strokes of the whip from Idek in front of everyone. Eliezer faints, loses control of his muscles, and is threatened by Idek never to tell anyone what he saw. On a Sunday, the air-raid sirens go off. Everyone was confined inside their blocks, and guards were ordered to shoot prisoners who were outside on sight. In the turmoil of the air raid, two cauldrons of soup are left outside on a path. The prisoners long for the soup but are terrified to leave the barracks. Hundreds of men watch as a single man crawls to the soup, thrusts his head into the liquid, and then dies. The planes begin to bomb the camp, and the prisoners are hopeful that Buna will be destroyed. They regain some hope. After the last bomb, the prisoners remember that they are still in a death camp, but they are cheerful and hopeful about the future.

A week later, the SS officers set up gallows and begin having hanging ceremonies during roll call. The first man to be executed had stolen two plates of soup. Strong and muscular, he is unafraid at his own execution and shouts "Long live liberty! A curse upon Germany!" right before dying. Although Eliezer is surrounded by death all the time at the concentration camps, he is overwhelmed by this man's solitary execution. Another man Juliek is jaded and just wants it to be dinnertime. After the execution, everyone is forced to march past the condemned man's hanging body and to look into his face. Eliezer remembers the soup being particularly good that night. Eliezer saw many executions, and the victims, having already lost their capacity for emotion, never cried. Only once did the jaded, dried-up prisoners weep at an execution. An Oberkapo and his pipel (a young boy who acted as his assistant) who everyone liked were suspected of blowing up a power plant on camp, but they refused, despite torture, to give any information about it. The little boy, who had the face of a sad angel, was sentenced to be hanged. The prisoner who usually served as executioner refused to perform his task and had to be replaced by an SS officer. When it came time for the execution, the child said nothing, and the whole camp observed in silence. Since the child was so light, he didn't die immediately when he fell, and he remained alive, hanging for half an hour. All the prisoners wept that day, and one man kept asking where God was. That day Eliezer's soup tasted like corpses.

Analysis

The narrative in this section is very fragmented, with specific events depicted in a brief, episodic manner. Wiesel devotes a few paragraphs or a page to each event, and they are generally unconnected and do not form a linear narrative. In other words, time is broken up in this part of the novel. This narrative technique mimics how Eliezer experienced time during this period of his life. While living in the concentration camp, the days were very regimented, with a rigorous schedule of meals, work, and roll call. The days were more or less all the same, and only the days in which Eliezer experienced extreme brutality or something very unusual stand out at all. Thus, Wiesel's narrative technique recreates his lived experience of random, unconnected events amidst the monotony of everyday camp life.

In this section Eliezer also describes the economy system of the concentration camp. Even though the prisoners have no real material possessions, they still create a barter system amongst themselves. In the absence of money, extra rations of bread or soup become their currency. The SS officers and prisoners in authority positions sometimes participate in the barter system, but they also have the power to entirely circumvent it. For example, an assistant head offers Eliezer extra food in exchange for his food. Even though Eliezer defies the assistant by refusing to give up his shoes, the shoes are taken from him anyway. Similarly, Eliezer is forced to give up his gold crown, although he does eventually receive extra food for it. At the beginning of the section, Eliezer notes how young boys are commodified by some authority figures as sex servants. These boys receive better food than the other prisoners. In the concentration camp, extra food becomes a precious commodity since everyone is constantly preoccupied with their hunger: "I now took little interest in anything except my daily plate of soup and my crust of stale bread. Bread, soup‹these were my life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach." By promising extra food, individuals are able to gain power and obtain favors from other prisoners.

As the prisoners remain longer in the concentration camp, they gradually begin to lose touch with their human emotions. When his father is beaten by an iron bar, Eliezer does not even feel any pity or compassion: "I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. What is more, any anger I felt at that moment was directed, not against the Kapo, but against my father. I was angry with him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek's outbreak." Along with the other prisoners, Eliezer is becoming concerned only with his own survival. In trying to remain alive, the prisoners cease to care about others and want only to eat and avoid being beaten. When the prisoners witness the first hanging execution, Juliek whispers, "Do you think this ceremony'll be over soon? I'm hungryŠ" This progression towards emotional numbness and fierce self-centeredness is a kind of reverse character development: the prisoners do not grow and mature, but instead regress into a perverse kind of childlike, emotionally void state. Occasionally, however, there are still rare displays of human emotion, such as when the French woman comforts Eliezer and when the prisoners weep at the hanging of the child prisoner.

The spectacle of the dying man crawling to reach the two cauldrons of soup is perhaps one of the most haunting images of the entire novel. It emphasizes how stripped of personality the prisoners were and how obsessively fixated they were on food and simple survival. Treated barbarously by the Nazis and severely undernourished, the prisoners have become hungry animals intent only on acquiring more food. For the dying man, reaching the cauldrons of soup represents a supreme accomplishment, and he musters up all of his energy just to reach his goal. It is tragic and very disturbing that the Nazis succeeded in reducing human beings to that base level of existence.

The hanging of the young boy greatly affects all inhabitants of the concentration camps. It arouses feelings of pity and sorrow that are a rarity in the jaded atmosphere of the death camp. The Nazis intend the public hangings to be an unspoken threat to the prisoners to keep them in line. However, they seem to cross the line when they hang the child. Even though they kill thousands in the crematory on a daily basis, the hanging of the child becomes an act of unspeakable and horrid cruelty. The prisoners all weep, and Eliezer feels like the Nazis have succeeded in killing God himself: "Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ŒWhere is God now?' And I heard a voice within me answer him: ŒWhere is He? Here He is‹He is hanging here on this gallows.'" In killing the child, the Nazis come dangerously close to destroying Eliezer's faith in God. Wiesel writes, "That night the soup tasted of corpses." After witnessing the execution, Eliezer feels like death is everywhere, and he is unable to enjoy his soup because all goodness has been destroyed.

Chapter 5 "The summer was coming to an endŠ"

Summary:

For Rosh Hashanah all the Jews gather together at the assembly place and are a little nervous, wondering whether the last day of the year might really be their last. Eliezer angrily compares God's greatness with the weakness of the assembled Jews. Thousands of men prostrate themselves to God, but Eliezer refuses to bless a God who has allowed crematories to exist. Though he used to be a mystic and used to love New Year's Day, this year he accuses God of injustice and feels strong, yet alone, without God or man. Eliezer runs to find his father when people start wishing each other a happy new year, but neither he nor his father say anything when they see each other. They both understand that the other is reluctant to observe the Jewish holiday. Eliezer and his father refuse to fast for Yom Kippur, and Eliezer feels a pleasant revolt against God. Nevertheless, he still feels a void in his soul.

Eliezer is transferred without his father to the building unit, where he has to drag blocks of stone around, and he learns that a selection (exam for assigning people to the crematory) is planned for that day. The head of Eliezer's block gives some helpful advice: run as fast as possible in front of the SS doctors, and don't be afraid. When Dr. Mengele appears, all the prisoners march in front of him as he writes down the numbers of those to be cremated. When Eliezer's turn comes, he runs as fast as he can, and his friends Yossi and Tibi tell him he was running too fast for Dr. Mengele to write his number down. Eliezer's father tells him that he also passed the selection. Afterwards, the head of the block tells them that nothing will happen to anybody and not to worry about the numbers Dr. Mengele wrote down. After a few days, the head of the block reads out a list of numbers of people who are to remain in the blocks instead of going to work, and everyone knows what is to happen to them. Eliezer's father runs up terrified, saying that his number has been called, and he gives Eliezer a knife and a spoon as parting gifts. Eliezer feels like he is is sleepwalking that entire day. After work, Eliezer finds out that his father had convinced the SS that he was still strong and luckily escaped the crematories. However, Akiba Drumer went to the crematories. Recently he had lost his faith and, simultaneously, all reason for living. He was not the only one who abandoned God during this time. Before his death he asked his fellow prisoners to say the Kaddish (the prayer for the dead) for him. Although they promised him they would, they forgot.

Winter arrives, and it is bitterly cold. Eliezer's foot begins to swell because of the cold, and he has to get an operation to prevent it from being amputated. The hospital is much more bearable since there is no work and better food. His bedside neighbor, a Hungarian Jew, warns him that all the invalids will be killed with the next selection and that he should try to leave the hospital right away. Eliezer does not know whether to believe him or to suspect that he just wants Eliezer's hospital bed. After he awakes from his operation, Eliezer worries that his leg has been amputated but is afraid to ask the doctor. The doctor tells him to trust him and that he will soon be walking in a fortnight. Two days after his operation, Eliezer hears that the front is advancing to Buna, and that very day the camp is ordered evacuated. Hospital occupants will not be evacuated, however, and Eliezer worries that all invalids will be exterminated. He runs to meet his father outside, and his right foot leaves bloody marks in the snow. After some deliberation, Eliezer and his father decide to leave the hospital and be evacuated with the rest of the prisoners. Later Eliezer learns that the hospital occupants were liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.

Eliezer returns to his barracks even though his wound is open and bleeding. The prisoners prepare for their journey with food and extra clothing. They go to sleep for their last night in Buna. The next morning Eliezer wraps his foot and tries to find more food. The head of the barracks orders the block thoroughly washed so that the liberating army will not think that animals had lived there. Finally, after night falls, they begin to march in blocks. It is snowing extremely hard.

Analysis

In this section Eliezer revolts against God and refuses to celebrate the Jewish New Year. However, he does not entirely lose his faith in God. At no point does Eliezer deny God's existence. Instead, he questions God's sense of justice and blames him for allowing the concentration camps to exist: "Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days?" Eliezer refuses to prostrate himself before an unjust God, but he never despairs. Instead, as the above passage indicates, he remains full of anger at God, never apathy, and this emotion keeps him alive. As Moché tells him in the beginning of the book, "Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them." In refusing to celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Eliezer is questioning God, but he will not receive any answers that he can understand yet. Although Eliezer's lack of religious devotion seems far removed from his earlier days diligently studying the cabbala, his experience in the concentration camps and his anger at God proves to be simply a testing of his faith.

In the nightmare world of the concentration camps, the Nazis replace God. Eliezer describes the scene at the selection: "All the prisoners in the block stood naked between the beds. This must be how one stands at the last judgment." The reference to the last judgment is a religious allusion to the end of the world, when God will decide who will be saved into heaven. In the perverse world of the concentration camps, Dr. Mengele takes on the role of God, deciding who will live and who will die. He casually wields the power of life or death over the prisoners, writing down identification numbers at will. In this world there is no justice and no goodness: everyone is at the mercy of the Nazis and their minions. And even though the head of the block tells the prisoners that no one will die, no one believes him. When he eventually reads out the numbers of those destined for the crematories, the prisoners know that the perverse justice of the Nazis has finally caught up with them: "We had understood. These were numbers chosen at the selection. Dr. Mengele had not forgotten."

Men like Akiba Drumer lose their faith when they start to believe that the Nazi evil is greater than the power of God. When they start to believe that it is impossible to escape the evil of the concentration camp, they lose their faith and, simultaneously, their will to live. Wiesel describes Akiba Drumer: "It was impossible to raise his morale. He didn't listen to what we told him. He could only repeat that all was over for him, that he could no longer keep up the struggle, that he had no strength left, no faith." Men like Akiba Drumer lose their faith when they start believing that the perverse justice of the Nazis is the only standard there is to live by.

Eliezer's experience in the hospital underscores how difficult it is to trust a fellow human being in the concentration camp. When a neighbor advises him to escape the hospital before there is another selection, Eliezer suspects his motives and does not know what to believe. After his operation, he is visited by the doctor, and he panics that his leg may have been amputated without his prior knowledge. He is too afraid to ask if his leg is gone but finally summons up the courage: "'Shall I still be able to use my leg?' He was no longer smiling. I was very frightened. He said: ŒDo you trust me, my boy?' ŒI trust you absolutely, Doctor.'" Although this doctor seems honest and kind, the brief conversation emphasizes Eliezer's vulnerability and complete helplessness. He has no reason to trust the doctor, seeing as every other authority figure in the camp has proved untrustworthy or cruel. Eliezer is constantly at the mercy of people who don't care about him and possibly even hate him, and the fact that this doctor-patient interaction seems so normal to the reader only emphasizes how abnormal and cruel every other interaction in the book is.

It is a painful irony that Eliezer and his father decide to be evacuated from Buna with the rest of the prisoners. Wiesel's tone in describing this tactical mistake is understated and quietly ironic. After Eliezer suggests to his father that they leave with the other prisoners, his father replies, "Let's hope that we shan't regret it, Eliezer." The very next paragraph reads: "I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital. They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation." This casual, almost off-handed paragraph clearly conveys the bitter regret that Wiesel feels for having made the wrong decision, and like the narrator, we are haunted by how things could have turned out differently had they decided to stay.

Chapter 6 "An icy wind blewŠ"

Summary:

The SS officers make the prisoners run through the snow, and they shoot those who fall behind. Eliezer feels separate from his body and wishes he could get rid of it because it is so heavy to drag along. He begins to run mechanically and starts to lose his sense of self. A man named Zalman suddenly gets a stomach cramp and has to go to the bathroom; he falls and is trampled by the crowd. Eliezer wants to die to stop feeling the pain, but knows that he must keep going in order to help his father. It is impossible to slow down because there are so many people in the mob. They keep running through the night, even after an SS officer announces they have already come 42 miles. When they finally stop to rest, Eliezer and his father go inside a shed. Eliezer falls asleep, but his father wakes him up almost immediately. All around them people are falling asleep and dying in the snow. Eliezer and his father agree to take turns sleeping, and Eliezer stays awake first, watching people sleep and die around him. He tries to wake up a neighbor, but the man refuses to heed his advice. Eliezer whispers into his father's ear, and his father is startled, trying to figure out where he is. Then his father inexplicably smiles, and Eliezer says that he will always remember that smile.

An old man named Rabbi Eliahou comes into the shed looking for his son, who was separated from him while running. Rabbi Eliahou is a good man, admired by all, and he and his son had remained together for three years in the concentration camps. Eliezer tells the Rabbi that he hasn't seen the man's son, but after he leaves, he realizes that he actually had. The son had seen his father falling behind in the pack, but he had continued to run farther and farther away from him. He had been trying to get away from the burden of looking after a weak father. Eliezer prays to God for the strength never to act in the same way that Rabbi Eliahou's son did. The prisoners continue to march, and even the SS officers seem tired and offer encouragement. Eliezer's foot seems completely frozen, and he resigns himself to having one leg in the future.

When they finally arrive at Gleiwitz, they are crowded into barracks, and Eliezer feels like he is going to be suffocated by the mass of people lying on top of him. People are crushing each other to death because it is so crowded, and Eliezer suddenly finds himself on top of Juliek, a boy who played the violin in the band at Buna. Eliezer is glad that Juliek is still alive and shocked to discover that he brought his violin with him. Then Eliezer begins to be suffocated by a man on top of him and has to fight his way out to get some air. He calls to his father, who is also still alive. That night Juliek miraculously extricates himself from the tangle of bodies and begins to play Beethoven soulfully on his violin. The music is so pure amidst the silence of the night, and Juliek puts his whole self and being into his music, which is only heard by an audience of dead and dying men. The next morning he finds Juliek dead and his violin crushed.

They stayed at Gleiwitz for three days without food or drink, and then are going to be deported into the center of Germany. The front is following them, but the prisoners do not believe that the Russians will ever arrive in time to liberate them. On the third day there is a selection, and although Eliezer's father is sent to the crematory group, Eliezer creates a disturbance so that he manages to sneak back into the other group. The prisoners wait standing for a train in the middle of a snow-covered field, and because they are deprived of water and forbidden from bending over, they begin eating snow from each other's backs using spoons. The SS officers simply laugh. Finally, a train arrives, and they are loaded in, a hundred per car.

Analysis

In this section Eliezer and the other remaining prisoners are pushed to the very limits of human capacity, both physically and mentally. Forced to run at least forty-two miles, Eliezer's mind feels like it is becoming disconnected from his body, and he continues to run mechanically without really realizing that he is doing so: "I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much. If only I had got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about it, I could feel myself as two entities‹my body and me. I hated it." Eliezer is barely conscious, yet keeps moving; though exhausted and malnourished, he and the other prisoners miraculously summon the superhuman energy to run for miles and miles. In this passage the Nazis succeed in completely destroying the bodily integrity and capacity for rational thought of their prisoners. The captives become simply bodies that move automatically and without thought; they are like animals who run by instinct alone to prevent themselves from being killed. The prisoners are motivated by blind terror alone; nothing else explains why they are able to keep running.

The prisoners lose their humanity and individuality as they run and instead merge into one collective mass of fleeing bodies. Though their running indicates how faceless and anonymous the prisoners have become, it also gives them a collective strength: "We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything‹death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth." Though individually weak and dying, collectively the prisoners are strong enough to withstand this new torture that the Nazis are inflicting on them. Simply because there are so many of them moving forward blindly, together they are able to overcome the cold and fatigue.

When Eliezer's father wakes up from his nap in the snow, he smiles inexplicably: "He stared all round him in a circle as though he had suddenly decided to draw up an inventory of his universe, to find out exactly where he was, in what place, and why. Then he smiled." Awakened from his dreams, he seems not to immediately recognize where he is, and it takes him awhile to make the transition from pleasant dreams to harsh reality. However, the real world that he faces upon awakening does not seem that much more real than his dream world, and it is for this reason that he smiles. His smile seems to indicate that, in the larger scheme of things, he recognizes that the nightmare world of the concentration camp is just as transient and insignificant as a dream. The smile implies that Eliezer's father can still find the goodness of God even among the Nazis and that he still retains the faith necessary for survival.

The episode involving Rabbi Eliahou and his son foreshadows Eliezer's own future attitude towards his father. When Eliezer realizes that the rabbi's son wanted to be free from a weak father who made his own survival more difficult, he prays to God, "My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done." Eliezer takes the actions of Rabbi Eliahou's son as a warning to himself and as an example of what not to do. However, his prayer to God is involuntary and suggests that he realizes he might behave in a way similar to that of the rabbi's son. As we shall see in the coming sections, Eliezer is right to pray to God for strength.

The image of Juliek playing the violin in the crowded barracks is the most beautiful one in the entire novel. Throughout the novel, Eliezer comments on how silent the barracks generally are at night, but this silence is one of terror, nightmares, and desperate exhaustion. As noted earlier, silence is one of the main themes of the novel, and sounds that break the silence, such as Madame Schaechter's hysterical screaming, prove very noticeable. Similarly, Juliek's violin-playing disrupts the silence, this time filling the night with rare beauty and poignancy: "He played a fragment from Beethoven's concerto. I had never heard sounds so pure. In such a silence." Juliek's music is unusually touching and heartrending because he puts his whole being into his playing. After being denied his life, humanity, and future by the Nazis and after having becoming emotionally numb from his time in the concentration camp, Juliek takes everything that has been denied him and infuses it into his music: "He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings‹his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again." The words "charred" and "extinguished" evoke the image of the fiery crematory and emphasize how crudely and barbarously the Nazis destroyed human life in the concentration camps.

Chapter 7 "Pressed up against the othersŠ"

Summary:

Inside the train bodies, both dead and alive, are tangled up in each other. Eliezer feels indifferent to everything, including death. Eliezer's father is near him, but does not respond to his call and seems dead. When the train stops, SS officers order that corpses be thrown out of the car. Two men begin to throw Eliezer's father out of the train, but Eliezer revives him by slapping him viciously and screaming desperately in his face. Twenty bodies are thrown out of the wagon. The prisoners travel for ten days, eating only snow. Day is like night.

Once, some German workmen begin throwing bread into the car and stand around watching as the prisoners tear each other to death for scraps. Desperate for food, the prisoners behave like wild beasts. Eliezer resolves not to fight for the food and notices one man who kills his own father for a piece of bread. Then, the son is killed for the same bread, and both father and son lie dead side by side. Eliezer notes at this point in the narrative that he is fifteen years old.

On the third night of the journey, Eliezer is awakened when someone randomly tries to strangle him. He calls to his father at the last minute and is saved by a man named Meir Katz, who had been a gardener at the Buna camp and was therefore more healthy and robust than everyone else. However, a few days later Meir Katz begins to cry, having finally lost his will to live.

On the last day of the journey, there is a bitter wind, and everyone gets up in order to try to keep warm. All the prisoners begin imitating the death cry of a fellow prisoner, and Meir Katz wonders out loud why the SS guards don't just shoot them all right away. Finally, they reach the camp, and only twelve people (of the original hundred) have the strength to leave the wagon. The others, including Meir Katz, remain on the train to die. They are at Buchenwald.

Analysis

While crowded into the train, Eliezer becomes indifferent to life or death, but he does not entirely lose his will to live: "Indifference deadened the spirit. Here or elsewhere‹what difference did it make? To die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was long and never ending." Eliezer does not want to die immediately because to him the distinction between life and death has become irrelevant. He is currently experiencing a living hell, and as he repeatedly remarks, the surviving prisoners are now no better than corpses. Everyone is dying, some more quickly than others, and the darkness of night has taken over the day. In this passage Wiesel once again expands on the symbolic meaning of the title Night. "Night" here refers to the living death of the concentration camps that Eliezer does not think will ever end.

Eliezer is continually amazed at how inhumane and beastlike the prisoners can become. Every time that he thinks he and the prisoners have suffered as much pain as they can bear and have behaved as cruelly as possible to one another, the Nazis lead them to behave even more basely and without human respect. The episode where German workmen throw bread into the train demonstrates that the prisoners are maniacally focused on getting food, at the expense of even their closest relations. They have become predatory animals: "Wild beasts of prey, with animal hatred in their eyes; an extraordinary vitality had seized them, sharpening their teeth and nails." Having been starved for ten days, the prisoners are willing to kill each other for bread. A young man even kills his father for a piece of bread. In this world there is no morality, but neither is there a need for the prisoners to live by any standard of morality. For they are no longer living in a world of social responsibility and respectability, and it makes perfect sense for them to behave as animals, without any regard to familial ties. The Nazis have created this environment, and the prisoners have no choice but to disregard the normal rules of human society.

At the end of this brief section, all the prisoners start imitating the death cry of one of the prisoners. The initial noise‹"the cry of a wounded animal"‹spreads to the entire train and indicates how ready the prisoners are to die. As Wiesel writes, "All limits had been passed. No one had any strength left. And again the night would be long." Life is no longer something that Eliezer and the other prisoners want to fight for; instead, it has become a painful, burdensome existence that they simply want to be free of. No one has any strength left to live, which, however, does not translate into any active desire to die. Instead, they wish passively for the Nazis to put them out of their misery. However, the Nazis probably realize that it is much more torturous to keep the prisoners alive rather than to kill them immediately.

Chapter 8 "At the gate of the campŠ"

Summary:

At the camp the prisoners are counted as usual and told to go to the showers. However, they are so weak that it is difficult for the guards to get them to move. Eliezer's father goes over to a pile of snow with his son and tells him that he can no longer go on. Eliezer is enraged that his father is ready to die after having survived for so long, and he argues with him for a long time not to stay in the snow. When the sirens go off, Eliezer is driven to the blocks, and everyone immediately falls asleep in the beds, without even paying attention to the cauldrons of soup.

In the morning Eliezer remembers that he has to look for his father. Part of him wants to forget about his weak, burdensome father, and he feels ashamed at these thoughts. Eliezer looks for his father for hours and finally finds him in the coffee line. His father is feverish and is unbelievably grateful when Eliezer brings him a cup of coffee. Later on, Eliezer's father tells him that the guards are refusing to feed the sick because they think they will die soon anyway. Eliezer unwillingly gives him the rest of his soup and realizes that he is no better than Rabbi Eliahou's son. On the third day of their arrival, everyone has to go to the showers. Eliezer sees his father in the distance, but when he goes to meet him, the man runs by him. The man was actually somebody else.

Eliezer's father has dysentery and is becoming increasingly weak in his bunk. In a delirious fever, he tells Eliezer where he buried the gold and money. Eliezer manages to bring his father to see a doctor, but the doctor refuses to look at him. Another doctor comes into the block, but Eliezer's father refuses to get up again. This doctor shouts at the sick, calling them lazy, and Eliezer feels like killing him but is too weak. When Eliezer returns from getting bread, his father tells him that his bunkmates have been hitting him. Eliezer promises them extra bread and soup, but they simply laugh at him and then angrily tell him that his father is upsetting them because he can no longer go outside to relieve himself. The next day his father tells Eliezer that his neighbors stole his bread and hit him again. He begs piteously for water, and even though Eliezer knows it is bad for him, he gives him some.

The head of the block gives Eliezer advice regarding his father. He tells him that in the concentration camps, it is every man for himself and that ties of family and friendship no longer count. He advises him not to give his food rations to his father and to instead his father's for himself. For a moment Eliezer agrees with him, but then immediately feels guilty.

Eliezer's father begs repeatedly for water. At night he calls out in the silence for water, and the SS guards shout at him to be quiet. When he keeps calling out to Eliezer, the guard hits him violently on the head with his truncheon. Eliezer is afraid to move from his bunk. His father once again says, "Eliezer," and is still breathing. After roll call, he gazes at his father's face for over an hour. When it is time to go to bed, his father is still alive. The next day, January 29, 1945, his father has been replaced by another invalid and taken to the crematory. Eliezer does not weep because he no longer has any more tears. And he admits that deep down inside himself, he feels freed by his father's death.

Analysis

In this section the father-son role is reversed, and Eliezer is forced to take care of his father. Overcome with cold and fatigue, Eliezer's father simply wants to lie down and rest in the snow, even though to do so means an almost certain death. He no longer cares about living, and like a child, begs to simply be left alone to sleep: "'Don't shout, sonŠ.Take pity on your old fatherŠ.Leave me to rest hereŠ.Just for a bit, I'm so tiredŠat the end of my strengthŠ' He had become like a child, weak, timid, vulnerable." Eliezer's father has given up and no longer wants the responsibility of trying to stay alive. As his son, Eliezer takes on this responsibility for him, but it is not one that he is sure he can handle.

In an earlier section, the reader hears about the behavior of Rabbi Eliahou's unfaithful son, and this episode foreshadows what happens in this section. Like Rabbi Eliahou's son, Eliezer cannot help but think of his dying father as a burden. Even though he hates himself for wanting to be rid of his father, he feels that the responsibility of looking after his father is lessening his own chances at survival. For example, when Eliezer goes to find his father, who he has left lying in a pile of snow, he thinks to himself, "Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself." Similarly, after his father's death, he is ashamed that he feels relieved: "And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like‹free at last!"

Compare Eliezer's feelings here to the feelings of Stein of Antwerp earlier in the book. For Stein, the idea that his wife and children are alive are enough to keep him alive for weeks. Similarly, early on in the book, Eliezer and his father persuade themselves that Tzipora and her mother are still surviving in order to keep their hopes up. In just a short time, however, a huge transformation has occurred in Eliezer and the other surviving prisoners. Family members no longer retain the same value as they did before, and in fact become almost irrelevant. Due to unbelievably harsh living conditions, Eliezer's world has narrowed to such an extent that only his own basic survival matters anymore. Anything that threatens that, including his father, proves to be a burden. Wiesel's point in describing this transformation is not to expose himself as a hideous scoundrel. Instead, he is revealing how effective Nazi brutality was in destroying men's souls and in making the prisoners devalue everything they had previously held so dear.

When Eliezer runs to meet someone who he has mistaken for his father, the image that the narrator conjures up is very mysterious and haunting:

"Seeing my father in the distance, I ran to meet him. He went by me like a ghost, passed me without stopping, without looking at me. I called to him. He did not come back. I ran after him: ŒFather, where are you running to?' He looked at me for a moment, and his gaze was distant, visionary; it was the face of someone else. A moment only and on he ran again."

This passage has symbolic significance on several different levels. First, it is unusual that Eliezer completely misrecognizes his father, especially since the father is so weak that it would be nearly impossible for him to run. Eliezer continues to think that the man is his father even after he sees him up close and even after the man is obviously not paying much attention to him. Eliezer has been spending every day with his father and surely knows what he looks like. The incident cannot be just a simple mistake because then Wiesel would not have bothered to record the event in his memoirs. Instead, this moment of misrecognition emphasizes how interchangeable, anonymous, and faceless all the prisoners have become. Their personalities have been destroyed, and when Eliezer looks at this stranger, he may as well be seeing his father.

Second, Eliezer sees this ghostlike apparition just before his father dies. The whole scenario seems very surreal and mystical, and the passage can be read as the ghost of his father preparing to leave the horrors of the concentration camp. The man is running through the camp, with his eyes focused on the world of the afterlife. Eliezer mistakes the man for his father because this is God's way of letting him know that his father will be moving on to a better world.

Third, the passage can be interpreted as having religious significance, and in this case the running man represents God. In the first section of the book, Moché teaches Eliezer that he must learn to ask God the right questions, and this passage can be seen as Eliezer trying to understand the problem of why a just God would allow the concentration camps to exist. Throughout the book, Eliezer has been trying to work this question out in his head, and in this passage it is visually represented by of the unheeding man running and looking off into the distance. Eliezer receives no answer from the man, just as he will probably never understand the answer that God has to give.

Chapter 9 "I had to stay at BuchenwaldŠ"

Summary:

Eliezer remains at Buchenwald until April 11. He has nothing to say of these last months in the concentration camps because after his father's death, he became indifferent and emotionless, concerned only with eating. He is transferred to the children's block.

On April 5, the SS guard is late to roll call, and everyone knows something must have happened. After two hours, an announcement goes out that all Jews must go to the assembly place. The children start to go to, but prisoners tell them to go back to their blocks, warning them that the Germans are going to shoot everyone. On the way back, they learn that "the camp resistance organization had decided not to abandon the Jews and was going to prevent their being liquidated." The next day there is a roll call, and the head of Buchenwald announces that the camp is to be liquidated. Ten blocks of deportees would be evacuated each day, and no more food would be distributed.

On April 10, the remaining 20,000 prisoners are to be evacuated and the camp blown up. A siren alert occurs, however, and the evacuation is postponed to the next day. Nobody had eaten anything for six days. The next morning the resistance movement suddenly battles the SS in the assembly place. The SS flees, and resistance takes charge of the camp. At six in the evening, the first American tank arrives at Buchenwald.

The first thing the newly-freed prisoners thought of was food. Then, they thought of clothes and sex. Nobody thought of revenge. Three days after Buchenwald was liberated, Eliezer became deathly ill with food poisoning and spent two weeks in the hospital. After he got a little bit better, he gathered enough strength to look at himself in the mirror. He had not seen his reflection since living in the ghetto. When he looks at himself, he sees the eyes of a corpse, and that image has never left him.

Analysis

Though Eliezer feels relieved when his father dies, it is clear that this emotion is merely a momentary one that he later deeply regrets. For after his father's death, Eliezer's life in the concentration camp also ceases to really exist: "I have nothing to say of my life during this period. It no longer mattered. After my father's death, nothing could touch me any more." The narrative ends rather abruptly after his father dies because to Eliezer, there is really no more story to tell. His story of life at Auschwitz and Buna has been one in which he and his father struggled together to survive, and after he dies, details become irrelevant.

In the last few pages of the novel, Wiesel leaves out some historical background that would make the narrative clearer. For example, he fails to explain what the camp resistance organization is, and he does not tell us exactly how close to defeat the Germans are. During this time Eliezer doesn't care about anything except feeding himself, and he probably isn't monitoring the war outside all that closely and just wants to get out of the concentration camp. The reader knows probably as much about the outside world during this time as the actual camp occupants do, and the omission of historical facts is therefore not all that important. The details of the liberation are not as important as the fact that the concentration camp survivors are finally able to escape the hellish world they have been living in.

Wiesel comments that none of the prisoners think of revenge when they are first freed. His tone in this passage suggests that he thinks that revenge should be sought, but in the very next paragraph, he describes how he became ill with food poisoning, and talk of revenge disappears from the narrative. However, the image that Wiesel concludes with implies that while revenge may be necessary, there is no way to reverse the damage that the Nazis inflicted on the Jewish people: "I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me." The Nazis transformed Eliezer into a living corpse, a shadow of his former self, and surrounded him with constant death and misery. They killed his family, reduced him to base, animal instincts, and denied him his humanity. No matter what revenge Eliezer and the other prisoners may seek from the Nazis, there is no way that they can undo what has already been done.

• Biography of Elie Wiesel
• Character List
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 2
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 3
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 4
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 5
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 6
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 7
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 8
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 9
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• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
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• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
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• Essays on Night
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