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Wiesel's story as told in Night
Moshe the Beadle
Night's narrator is Eliezer, a studious and deeply pious Orthodox Jewish teenager, who studies the Talmud by day, and at night runs to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple.[8] In the synagogue, and to the disapproval of his father who sees him as too young for it, Eliezer discusses the Kabbalah and the mysteries of the universe with Moshe the Beadle, the town's humblest resident—"awkward as a clown" but much loved—Moshe teaching him that "man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," and that "every question possess[es] a power that [does] not lie in the answer."[7] Night returns repeatedly to the theme of faith sustained by questions.
When the Hungarian government rules that Jews unable to prove their citizenship will be expelled, Moshe is crammed onto a cattle train and taken to Poland. Somehow he manages to escape, miraculously saved by God, he believes, so that he might save the Jews of Sighet. He hurries back to the village to tell what he calls "the story of my own death."[9]
| “ | There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or the Kabbalah, but only of what he had seen. People refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to him.[10] | „ |
Moshe runs from one household to the next. "Jews, listen to me! It's all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!"[9] The cattle train crossed the border into Poland, he tells them, where it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were transferred to lorries and driven to a forest in Galicia, near Kolomaye, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole, present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. Moshe tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen.[11]
| “ | He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has! they said. Or even: Poor fellow. He's gone mad. And as for Moshe, he wept.[10] | „ |
The Sighet ghettos
Over the next 18 months, restrictions on Jews gradually increase. No valuables are to be kept in Jewish homes. They are not allowed to visit restaurants, attend the synagogue, or leave home after six in the evening. They must wear the yellow star at all times. Eliezer's father makes light of it:
| “ | The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it ... (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)[12] | „ |
The SS decide to transfer the Jews to one of two ghettos, jointly run like a small town, each with its own council or Judenrat.
| “ | The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department—a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. 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 brothers ... It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto—it was illusion.[12] | „ |
In May 1944, the Judenrat is told the ghettos will be closed with immediate effect and the residents deported. They are not told their destination, only that they may each take a few personal belongings.[14] The next day, Eliezer watches as the Hungarian police, wielding truncheons and rifle butts, round up his friends and neighbors, then march them through the streets. "It was from that moment that I began to hate them, and my hate is still the only link between us today."[9]
| “ | And there was I, on the pavement, unable to make a move. Here came the Rabbi, his back bent, his face shaved ... His mere presence among the deportees added a touch of unreality to the scene. It was like a page torn from some story book ... One by one they passed in front of me, teachers, friends, others, all those I had been afraid of, all those I once could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs.[8] | „ |
Auschwitz
Eliezer, his parents, and his sisters are crammed into a railway car with another 80 people, with little to eat or drink, barely able to breathe. One elderly woman becomes hysterical, screaming that she can see flames.[16] They finally arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, known as Auschwitz II, an extermination camp, one of three main camps and 40 subcamps in the Auschwitz complex. Between 1940 and 1945, around 1.1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles, 18,000 Roma, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war were killed in Auschwitz.[17] Men and women are separated on arrival. Eliezer and his father are sent to the left; his mother, Hilda, Beatrice, and Tzipora to the right. He learned years later that his mother and Tzipora had been taken straight to the gas chamber.
| “ | For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother's hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister's fair hair ... and I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever.[18] | „ |
The remainder of Night describes Eliezer's initial desperate efforts not to be parted from his father, not even to lose sight of him; his grief and shame at witnessing his father's decline into helplessness; and as their relationship changes and the young man becomes the older man's caregiver, his resentment and guilt, because his father's existence threatens his own. The stronger Eliezer's need to survive, the weaker the bonds that tie him to other people. His loss of faith in human relationships is mirrored in his loss of faith in God. During the first night, he and his father wait in line to be thrown into a firepit. He watches a lorry draw up and deliver its load of children into the fire. While his father recites the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead—"I do not know whether it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves"[19]—Eliezer considers throwing himself against the electric fence. Just at that moment, he and his father are saved, ordered to go to their barracks instead of into the pit. But Eliezer is already destroyed. "[T]he student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me."[20]
| “ | 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 faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. | „ |
Ellen Fine writes that this passage contains the main themes of Night: the death of God, children, innocence, even self. The défaite du moi, dissolution of the self, is a recurring theme in Night, and in Holocaust literature in general.[23] With it goes Eliezer's sense of time.
| “ | I glanced at my father. How he had changed! ... The night was gone. So much had happened within such a few hours that I had lost all sense of time. When had we left our houses? And the ghetto? And the train? Was it only a week? One night—one single night?[20] | „ |
God is not lost to Eliezer entirely. During the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear, and weeps.
| “ | Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.[24] | „ |
Fine writes that this is the central event in Night, the religious sacrifice, Isaac bound to the altar, Jesus nailed to the cross.[25] Alfred Kazin, the American literary critic, describes it as the literal death of God, a scene that he says made the book famous.[26] Shortly after the hanging, the other inmates celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish new year, but Eliezer cannot take part.
| “ | Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? ... But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man.[2] | „ |
Death march
In or around August 1944, Eliezer and Shlomo are transferred from Birkenau to Auschwitz III, a work camp, their lives reduced to the avoidance of violence and the constant search for food. "Bread, soup—these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach."[27] The only time they experience joy is when the Americans bomb the camp. "[W]e were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life."[28]
In January 1945, with the Soviet army approaching, the Germans flee the camp, taking 60,000 inmates, mostly Jews, to concentration camps in Germany, on what becomes known as death marches, shooting anyone too weak to continue. Eliezer and Shlomo march to Gleiwitz to be put on a freight train to Buchenwald, a camp near Weimar, around 350 miles (563 kms) from Auschwitz.
| “ | An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering. Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch. | „ |
Resting in a shed after marching 50 miles (80 km), Rabbi Eliahou asks if anyone has seen his son. They had stuck together for three years, "always near each other, for suffering, for blows, for the ration of bread, for prayer," but the rabbi had lost sight of him in the crowd and is now scratching through the snow looking for his son's corpse. "I hadn't any strength left for running. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know."[30] Wiesel doesn't tell the man that his son had noticed his father limping, and had run faster, letting the distance between them grow.
| “ | A terrible thought loomed up in my mind: he had wanted to get rid of his weak father! ... [He] had sought this separation in order to get rid of the burden, to free himself from an encumbrance ... And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done.[31] | „ |
The inmates march to Gleiwitz, where they spend two days and nights locked inside cramped barracks without food, water, or heat, literally sleeping on top of one another, so that each morning the living wake up on top of the dead. There is more marching to the train station and onto a cattle wagon with no roof, and no room to sit down until other inmates make space by throwing the dead onto the tracks. They travel for ten days and nights, with only the snow falling on them for water. Of the 100 Jews in Wiesel's wagon, 12 survive the journey.
| “ | I woke from my apathy just at the moment when two men came up to my father. I threw myself on top of his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hand, crying: Father! Father! Wake up. They're trying to throw you out of the carriage ... | „ |
Buchenwald
The Germans are waiting with loudhailers and orders to head for a hot bath. Wiesel is desperate for the heat of the water, but his father sinks into the snow, unable to move. "I could have wept with rage ... I showed him the corpses all around him; they too had wanted to rest here ... I yelled against the wind ... I felt I was not arguing with him, but with death itself, with the death he had already chosen.[33]
An alert sounds, the camp lights goes out, and Eliezer, exhausted, follows the crowd to the barracks, leaving his father behind. He wakes at dawn on a wooden bunk, remembering that he has a father, and goes in search of him. "But at that same moment this thought came into my mind. 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. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever."[34]
His father is in another block, sick with dysentery. The other men in the bunk, a Frenchman and a Pole, attack Shlomo because he can no longer go outside to relieve himself. Eliezer is unable to protect him. "Another wound to the heart, another hate, another reason for living lost."[35] Begging for water one night from his bunk, where he has lain for a week, Shlomo is beaten on the head with a truncheon by an SS officer for making too much noise. Eliezer lies in the bunk above and does nothing.
| “ | I did not move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also receiving a blow. Then my father made a rattling noise and it was my name: Eliezer. I could see that he was still breathing—spasmodically. | „ |
In the morning, January 29, 1945, Eliezer finds another man lying in his father's place. The Kapos had come before dawn and taken him to the crematorium, possibly still alive.
| “ | His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond. I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like—free at last![36] | „ |
Liberation
Eliezer's father missed his freedom by only a few weeks. The Soviets had liberated Auschwitz 11 days earlier, and the Americans were making their way towards Buchenwald. Eliezer is transferred to the children's block where he stays with 600 others, dreaming of soup. On April 5, 1945, the inmates are told the camp is to be liquidated, and they are to be moved—another death march. On April 11, with 20,000 inmates still in the camp, a Jewish resistance movement attacks the remaining SS officers and takes control. At six o'clock that evening, the first American tank arrives at the gates, and behind it the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army. Eliezer is free.[37]
- Introduction
- Background
- Wiesel's story as told in Night
- Writing and publishing
- Reception
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
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