Textual Analysis Of The Book Night

After 10 years of a personally vowed silence post liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp, Elie Wiesel wrote the autobiographical novel Night to tell his horrific story. A graphic novel of his time in several concentration camps, Wiesel takes but only 90 pages to write how he became an orphan during the Holocaust. After reading the novel, there are several aspects that shed light on other relevant themes of the time, undoubtedly leading to conflicting likes and dislikes regarding the novel. Collectively, Night is a riveting novel that needs recognition of its story, underlying themes and an exhibition of the real Holocaust from a Jewish first person point of view.

As in partial fulfillment of the course titled “Global History of

the Twentieth century”, it was assigned to choose a novel with relevancy to the course content and complete a full textual review. After a large amount of pondering, the novel Night by Elie Wiesel was chosen for a number of reasons. Not being a fast reader, the novels length being a mere 90 pages was easily a primary factor that it originally caught my attention. Looking at the books details, I noticed that it was very highly rated with a large number of comments raving about the novel. Not too sure if I was to choose Night I mentioned it in passing to my mother during a phone conversation, who proceeded to enlighten me on the book. Little did I know that the author Elie Wiesel himself lives but 30 short minutes from my own home. She followed this information up with a dissertation proclaiming that I must read the book because of its moving and disturbing nature of reality back in the 1940’s Germany. After getting off the phone with my elated mother, I decided to look at Night again. Knowing this new information, I began to look deeper into what the novel was about and found its disturbing nature to be intriguing. Being an avid Ellen Hopkins reader, novels about societies down fall is something I consistently find myself reading. A novel that follows such a theme, Wiesel writes his autobiographical about his life while in the concentration camps. For these reasons I chose to read Elie Wiesel’s Night.
The story of Night by Elie Wiesel is a powerful autobiography of the horrors he faced during his adolescents. The beginning of the book is set in modern day Sighet, Romania. In the mist of World War Two, the Wiesel family are not poorly off in their town. A devout young boy of faith, Elie is very dedicated to the synagogue. A nomad named Moshe the Beadle is one of the few in town that are at all concerned of the incroaching German soliders. When they are close, the soliders ordered all non-natives to leave the town with a group of the soliders. All but Moshe the Beadle were never heard from again. The nomad returned to Sighet spewing rapidly of the horrors that he nearly escaped, of which no one believed. Sadly this was a foreshadow of their own fate that went unheard. Soon after German troops began restricting the Jewish peoples of Sighet. When the restriction increased, the Jewish community was moved into two ghettos surrounded by barbed wire. With optimism still high, the community still perceived that nothing of major magnitude would happen to them. After a small while in the over crowded ghettos, they were moved via 100 to a rail car to a secret location. During the trip Madame Schachter cried lucid remarks relentlessly of a fire that was to burn them all. Little did they know the crazed woman would actually predict the fate of most of her peers. Arriving at Birkenau, a reception center for Auschwitz. Here is where the horrors truly began. “Men to the left! Women to the right!” A statement that would cut Elie’s family by more than half, taking away his mother and sisters from him, of which he would never see them again. After being separated, Elie and his father were shaved, stripped and marched into Auschwitz shortly after being marched right to the doors of the cemetery. The first night at the concentration camp, Elie said, "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." At this point Elie understands the magnitude of his situation. After three weeks, Elie and his father were marched to Buna. Here, both men are severely beaten multiple times by Idek and greatly weaken in emotional and physical stamina. In addition to the horrors, selections are a regular process to eliminate those that are too weak to work in the warehouses. During one specific selection, Chlomo was selected but got out of it on the second round thankfully. It is also at this point that Elie begins to question his faith. This is seen multiple times in Buna and continues throughout the remainder of the novel. An example of Elie’s questioning is when he says, "I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." During the winter at Buna, Elie’s foot becomes severely infected to the point of needed surgery and not knowing if he would lose his leg or not. Thankfully he was able to keep both his leg and foot once the massive amount of puss had been drained. While recovering in the camp hospital, word came that the Russian’s were closing in on the camp and that the camp was to be evacuated, leaving those in the hospital to whatever fate and moving those in the main bunkers to a camp in central Germany. Fearful that they would be killed if they chose to stay, or separated, a fate worse than death to them, Elie and Chlomo decided to join the ranks of those who were in the general bunkers and leave the hospital. A poor decision on their part, the two became part of a 24-hour death march to Gleiwitz. Surrounded by SS officer, those that stepped out of formation were shot on spot and those that could no longer run at the pace the offers ordered fell to their death of being ran over by the thousands that ran for their lives. Here Elie watches a boy of his age pause due to a stomach cramp and be overcome by those proceeding him, to never be seen again. After running for 42 miles straight, the prisoners were allowed to walk to the point of contact for Gleiwitz. Piled in such close quarters, many individuals were suffocated to death. One of the victims were Juliek, a young boy that Elie had made friends with in Buna. The young boy played his violin until Elie fell asleep. When he awoke, Juliek was dead. After three days of no food or water at the camp, the survivors were loaded onto cattle cars with no roofs in the snow and sent to Buchenwald. A long ride, when the train stopped, those who had died were thrown off the carts into the snow. Later in the trip, when the trail arrived at populated towns the people would find it amusing to throw pieces of bread into the rail cars at which point the prisoners would fight to the death for a mere crumb of the bread. Elie refused to participate in this torture stating, "How could I forget that concert, given to an audience of dying and dead men!" At one point in his own cattle car, Elie watch a son kill his father because he had two pieces of bread, one for him and another for his son who murdered him. The once people had not become animals. Another horror that occurred on the cattle cars was the near end of Chlomo. At one stop Chlomo was nearly thrown from the rail when he would not wake up. Elie woke his father up by smacking him as hard as he could at which point he vaguely opened his glazed eyes. Once they arrived at Buchenwald it became apparent that Chlomo was gravely ill with dysentery. Knowing that his father would not be alive much longer, he stayed with him as much as he possible could. One night when an SS officer was walking through the living quarters, Chlomo was begging Elie for some water. Because Chlomo did not adheard to the SS officer’s orders to silence himself he did if for him by sharrering his skull. Elie stayed with his father the entire night until he fell asleep next to him. In the morning his father was gone. Realizing that his father had been taken to the cremetery while he slept, Elie broke, stating "After my father's death, nothing could touch me any more." For four months, Elie remained in this state. On 5 April 1945, a group of American liberators arrived at Buchenwald and liberated Elie. Shortly After liberation Elie came down with food poisioning causing him to be hospitalized. When he finally was able to regain his strength he asked to look in the mirror. To conclude the novel Wiesel states, "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."
After reading the novel and taking a break from it to emotionally recover, I was able to better analyze the novel for it’s literally aspects.

While it is a brief novel, there are several notable aspects. One way in which this book is different from others of its time and contexts is by it being written in the first person point of view of Elie Wiesel. This showed not only the prospective of Jewish individual in the Nazi concentration camps but also gave a different prospective of the SS officers. Because of this point of view, the book becomes immersive into Wiesel’s life, making it extremely graphic and disturbing to see it through his adolescent eyes. However, because of this, by the end of the book the reader is severely emotionally drained and in shock. At points while reading the book it is difficult to not be nauseous due to the nature of the situations. While I do wish the novel was longer and more detailed at points, because of the sickening scenes it is apparent as to why Wiesel did not extend the novels length. Another difficult part of the book was the lack of humanization of the individuals that Elie interacted with during his journey. This crescendos during the novel and reaches an apex and continues for the remainder of the book beginning when he speaks about the faceless patient in the hospital. However, the most critically important aspect of of Elie Wiesel’s novel are the deeply rooted themes that extend far beyond the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The most apparent theme of Night is the degradation of human life in genocide. At Birkenau after selection each prisoner was no longer a person with a name but rather a number with no use in the world in the minds of the SS officers, following the orders of the madman Hitler. This dehumanization continues in every concentration camp that Wiesel experiences and ultimately leads to his father’s direct cause of death via an SS officer’s blow to the head, shattering his skull for merely pleading his

son for water being severely dehydrated because of a disease he had contracted during the death march to Buchenwald. This could easily be considered one of the most disturbing aspects of the novel. Another theme in Night is the human natures innate ability to do incredible things to just stay alive. This is shown several times throughout the novel, becoming more and more used as idea of liberation becomes a meager end result. The most notable situation in which the human desire to life was apparent was during the death march in which the entire camp ran 42 miles straight in order to make a decent enough buffer between the SS officers and the Russian’s at the encroaching front. While people do run marathons every day, this run was much further than a usual marathon and those participating were far too emaciated to be doing such vigorous activity. Amazingly however, most of the people made it out of fear of being shot on spot if they stepped out of line or trampled to death if they were to fall down. Family is also an underlying theme that is present in Night. From the beginning when the Wiesel’s had the opportunity to leave the ghettos but both of Elie’s parents made a point to instill the mandate that they must stick together as a family. Even when Elie was separate from his mother and sister he stayed with his father. Both Elie and Chlomo became one another’s reason to live. When Chlomo became ill and his death was impending, Elie was with his father every possible moment that he could. Even when his father’s skull was shattered by the SS officer, Elie stayed with his father until he fall asleep next to him and they took him away before Elie awoke.
A riveting and graphically disturbing novel at times, Night takes its readers on a 90 page journey of life as a Jewish family in the concentration camps in the mid 1940’s. As a part of his journey, Wiesel metaphorically contemplates several aspects of life and spirituality all while holding onto life by only soup and bread rations. While a skeleton with skin of a man at the time, he still manages to keep his humility in such an environment of dismay, something that most had not been so mentally fit to do. Because of his well-written autobiographical story, it is my opinion that Night by Elie Wiesel should be read and enjoyed by all those who are old enough to understand and handle its graphic content in order to better understand the Holocaust. An adequate understanding of this time in history is imperative because if one does not understand their past, it is inevitable that it will repeated itself in the future.