Night

Without a doubt, one of the darkest episodes in the history of mankind involved the systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and gays by Nazi Germany. In order to get a good sense of the horror and despair that was felt by the interned, one simply needs to read the memoirs of Elie Wiesel in his “Night”, as translated from French by Stella Rodway and copyrighted by Bantam Books in 1960.

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania. His parents ran a shop and cared for him and his three siblings, Hilda, Bea, and Tzipora. Early on, the Jewish community of Sighet payed little heed to the stories of what had happened to foreign Jews that were expelled. By the time Germans had entered Sighet, it was too late for the people to escape their fates. At first, they were made to give up all of their valuable possessions and move into makeshift ghettos. Next came deportation of the entire community to the Auschwitz internment camp. The way that the people were piled into cattle wagons was only a precurser of appalling events that were to come. The horror really dawned on Elie when he realized that the large smokestacks that he saw were from crematoriums that were set up to burn the bodies of the thousands upon thousands of Jews that were killed in the gas chamber. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. The prisoners were given only black coffee in the morning, and soup and a crust of bread in the evening. The most terrifying aspect of the entire experience was the “selection”, the picking out of those that were to sick, old, or weak to be useful. These unfortunate souls were thrown into the fires. The one constant in Elie’s life was his father, who along with his son and all other prisoners, were later forced to evacuate to trains that would bring them to the Buchenwald internment camp deep in Germany, under the pressure of the Allied forces on the area. The final horrific scene in this book was how the interned, in mass, were forced to run full speed for hours on end, the people that lagged being shot on sight. The story culminated in the death of Elie’s father, and the eventual freedom of the Survivors of these death camps.

The way that Elie describe...

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... day, Pope John Paul II apologized for the past sins of the church, but did not address the way that Pope Pious VII threw a deaf ear towards the Holocaust. What is more disturbing than the fact that their was not opposition to the Nazis by other European countries is the fact that something as horrible as this could happen again. In Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990’s, the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims and Croats by Serbs led to the removal of 2.5 million people from cities and villages, mass murders, and the internment of men and boys in as many as 100 concentration camps. Although the situation did not escalate to the point of the Holocaust, it showed the ignorance of people as to past events.

To conclude, Elie Wiesel’s “Night” is a haunting and accurate account of the cruelty that man can inflict on man. The lessons learned from this account cannot be forgotten. If they are, then they are sure to be repeated.

Works Cited

“Ethnic Cleansing.” The Complete Reference Collection. 1998ed. CD-ROM. The

Learning Company, Inc., 1998.

“Holocaust.” The Complete Reference Collection. 1998ed. CD-ROM. The Learning