Night

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Night

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Eastern Europe during World War II; published in 1958.

SYNOPSIS

Eliezer, a young Jewish boy from the Hungarian Transylvanian town of Sighet, survives deportation to Poland’s Auschwitz extermination camp, where his mother and younger sister are murdered, and then to another camp at Buchenwald, where his father dies.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet in 1928. In 1944 he was deported with his family to a Nazi extermination camp whose purpose was to obliterate Europe’s Jewish population. After the Allied victory in 1945, he lived in France with other young survivors of the camps. Wiesel studied psychology, literature, and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris before beginning his career as a journalist in 1948. In 1958 Wiesel published Night, a vivid and chilling novelistic account of his experiences in the war.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Final Solution

When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, its leader Adolf Hitler pledged to create a German state in which Jews lived segregated from other Germans. The Nazis at first encouraged Jews to emigrate, but as the Nazis annexed or invaded other territories, they adopted more drastic solutions to what they called “the Jewish question.” One of the first strategies was to crowd Jewish families into ghettos surrounded by walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire. In these wretched conditions thousands of Jews died of starvation and abuse.

Eventually, Hitler ordered the extermination of all of European Jewry. One early method was to round up large numbers of Jews and line them up before a ditch, then machine-gun them. But this approach cost valuable ammunition. To avoid the inconvenience of these chaotic massacres, the Nazis formulated the so-called “Final Solution” in 1942. All of Europe’s Jews were to be sent by train to camps in Nazi-occupied Easten Europe. There they would be killed by gas inhalation. To avoid disorder, no murders were to be committed in or near the cities where the victims had lived. Deportation to these camps was referred to as “resettlement,” a deceptive term, and the trains were called “Special Resettlement Trains.” The Jews would perish either in specially designed gas vans, where they asphyxiated from exhaust inhalation, or in gas chambers at the camps.

Concentration and extermination camps

Altogether about seven thousand camps of various kinds imprisoned people against their will during World War II. The concentration camps, erected as early as 1933, were originally labor camps for political opponents of the Nazi regime. The camps imprisoned communists, Gypsies, and Jews, who toiled under abominable conditions under the watchful eye of camp authorities. Select prisoners, called Kapos (presumably from caput, Latin for “head”—capo in Italian), some of whom were sadistic criminals, helped maintain order. Although tales of torture and murder in the concentration camps inspired dread in the late 1930s, the more deadly extermination camps in the east that were created in the 1940s made the original concentration camps seem mild. While deaths from malnutrition, overwork, violent repression, and even medical experiments were not uncommon, the concentration camps were at least not dedicated to systematic extermination, as the death camps were.

To implement their “Final Solution,” the Nazis created extermination camps, beginning the systematic gassing of Jews in 1942. The six main extermination camps—Maidanek (50,000 killed), Belzec (550,000 killed), Chelmno (150,000 killed), Sobibor (200,000 killed), Treblinka (800,000 killed), and Auschwitz (1,000,000 killed)—were all on Polish soil.

Auschwitz was originally a concentration camp where prisoners served as slave laborers in the nearby coal mines. In 1942 an extermination camp was built in the village of Birkenau, close to Auschwitz. Birkenau was equipped with crematoriums and buildings sealed to make gas chambers. Jews arriving at Birkenau would be separated into two groups. Those perceived as useful were sent on to Auschwitz. Those deemed unfit for work were told to hurry into large buildings marked “showers” or “wash room.” The doors were locked behind them and poisonous gas flooded the chambers.

Prisoners sent to Auschwitz were stripped, deloused, tattooed with serial numbers, and confined to overcrowded barracks. In the barracks they were under the supervision of a Kapo, who might be discharged or even killed if the Nazis suspected the Kapo of being too lenient on his fellow prisoners. Each day, after an assembly for roll call, the prisoners were sent to various jobs—many to work in the mines, others to sort the clothes and possessions of those gassed at Birkenau. Some were assigned the task of shoveling the bodies into the crematory.

The prisoners suffered outrageous tortures, and few lived longer than a year inside the camp. Forced to work all day, they were given only crusts of bread and occasionally some watered soup to eat. Almost arbitrarily, Nazis would make “selections,” sending the weak or infirm to the gas chambers to make room for new inmates. Casual brutality was common. There were instances of pregnant women being shot and children being beaten to death. Any resistance was ruthlessly punished. The other prisoners were often assembled to witness hangings or beatings.

The liberation of Buchenwald

In April 1945, when American advances ensured an Allied victory against Germany, the administration of Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany, was in disarray. Eager to present himself to the conquering troops as a humane official, the commandant, Hermann Pister, was hesitant to obey orders from Berlin to evacuate or kill the remaining prisoners. An underground resistance movement forged a communication from the American forces, promising to be lenient with Pister if he surrendered the camp and spared the lives of the prisoners.

Between April 3 and April 10 of 1945, 20,000 inmates had been evacuated, more than half of them Jews. Most died on the way to other camps, but the number of dead would have been even greater had it not been for the defiance of the prisoners within the camp. Their open refusal to obey orders to assemble for transport frustrated the Germans. Pister failed to instigate the normal brutal reprisals for defiance and indeed had fled Buchenwald by April 10. On April 11, a communist-based resistance group emerged with arms stolen from the Nazi command and took control of the camp.

A case of Hungarian complicity

During the Nazi era, Hungary aligned itself with Germany in hope of regaining territory it had lost in World War I. Although anti-Semitism was strong in Hungary, Hungary’s leader, Miklós von Nagy-bánya Horthy, had struggled to limit Hungary’s participation in the mass murders of Jews without provoking German reprisal. In 1941, 14,000 to 16,000 foreign Jews were deported from Hungary to the Ukraine in the Nazi-occupied part of the Soviet Union, where they were slaughtered. When Horthy learned of their fate, he ordered a stop to the deportations.

In 1944 Horthy hoped to negotiate a truce with Germany’s enemies. Nazi sympathizers in the Hungarian government betrayed him to Hitler, and German troops, led by Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Nazi “Race and Resettlement” office, occupied Hungary. Horthy was forced to cede power to the Nyilas (Fascist) Party, led by Dome Sztò;jay, a firm Nazi sympathizer.

Until the German occupation, most Hungarian Jews, though subject to the injustices of anti-Semitism, had at least remained safe from the massacres that had taken place in the rest of Nazioccupied Europe. But in April and May of 1944, on the eve of German defeat, the Hungarian Jews suffered the swiftest deportation and extermination yet organized by the Nazis. Within three months, 400,000 to 500,000 Jews were isolated and their property expropriated; they were then deported and finally murdered. The Jews in Transylvania, the eastern region of Hungary, were deported first to prevent their liberation by advancing Russian forces. By the time the Soviet armies liberated Budapest in February 1945, less than a fourth of the Jewish population remained.

Deadly silence

In April 1944, two prisoners of Auschwitz, Fred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, escaped to Slovakia, where they wrote what is now called the Vrba-Wetzler report, an extensive description of the extermination camps. As workers at Birkenau, they had witnessed the construction of new ovens and larger gas chambers. Their report outlined the preparations underway to deport and destroy the Hungarian Jews. Vrba warned, “[O]ne million Hungarian Jews are going to die. Auschwitz is ready for them. But if you tell them [the Hungarian Jews] now, they will rebel. They will never go to the ovens” (Vrba in Braham, p. xii).

Writing about Vrba’s warning, Wiesel insists that the message was communicated to the leaders of the Jewish community in Budapest. Yet the few Hungarian survivors of Auschwitz maintain that they did not have the slightest suspicion that their deportation journey was to end in systematic extermination. If a significant number of Jewish leaders in Hungary were aware that the deportees were not being resettled, but murdered, why were the majority of Jews not informed?

Was it that the Jewish leaders did not believe the reports of the “Final Solution”? Or was it that they feared to endanger themselves by disseminating the news of the massacres? In any case, some prominent Jews either bribed or allowed themselves to be bribed by Nazi agents to win their own safety. What appears to be the most devastating betrayal was that of Rezso Kasztner, the chairman of the Hungarian Zionist Organization and the head of the Jewish Agency’s “Rescue Committees” in Hungary. In the spring of 1944 Eichmann summoned Kasztner to his hotel quarters in Budapest. He offered to spare the lives of 380 Zionist Jews from the town of Kluj (Kasztner’s hometown). In return Kasztner was to journey to Kluj, where his presence and the news of his negotiations with the authorities would pacify the Jews and expedite deportation. Kasztner knew—as his later testimony in Jerusalem, Israel, would prove—that the deportees were being gassed in Birkenau. Yet he remained silent, hoping to save 380 Jews whom he personally would choose. He may have thought that any other possibility of saving Jewish lives was nil.

Eichmann hoped, by manipulating Kasztner, to avoid complications. In 1943 a revolt in the Warsaw ghetto in Poland had demanded the attention of the German occupiers, costing numerous German lives and slowing down the process of extermination. By 1944 Germany was losing the war and could hardly spare thousands of troops in Hungary. Although they had the collaboration of the Hungarian police, the Nazis feared they might not be able to suppress an uprising if one should occur in Hungary. In Kluj, a town that lay only three miles from the Romanian border, there were a mere twenty Hungarian gendarmes and one officer from the Nazi command to oversee 20,000 Jews.

MOCHE THE BEADLE

In real life, there was a poor Hasidic Jew who, like Wiesel’s character Moche the Beadle, had survived the deportations of 1941 and returned to warn the Jews of Sighet. “We didn’t believe him,” Wiesel wrote, “why should we believe a poor beadle? There were influential, important people who knew [better]” (Wiesel in Braham, p. xiv).

The 20,000 Jews of Kluj had already been confined to a ghetto; 1,200 of them had supposedly been “resettled” in a town called Kenyermeze (the name means “bread-field”). Despite cheerful “letters” allegedly from the Jews in Kenyermeze (they were already ashes in the Auschwitz crematory), some of the young men of Kluj were restless. Nazi promises hardly calmed them. Eichmann needed another Jew, preferably someone authoritative, to soothe the Hungarian Jews and encourage cooperation.

Kasztner arrived in Kluj with the comforting news of his negotiations. The deportees, he insisted, were being taken to Kenyermeze, while the chosen 380 were going to what he vaguely described as a better place. One of Kasztner’s associates (and one of the chosen 380) encouraged the other Jews to hurry to Kenyermeze “because the first arrivals there would get the best places” (Hecht, p. 106). Those Jews selected to live were kept behind all the others who had been deported.

Kasztner continued his negotiations. To save the lives of prominent Zionists, he and the associates of his Rescue Committees remained silent about the gas chambers of Auschwitz. His cooperation proved an enormous help to the Nazis. Eichmann wrote in his confessions:

[Kasztner] agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation—and even to keep order in the collection camps—if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain.... I believe Kasztner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goals.... And because Kasztner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape.
(Eichmann, p. 146)

The Novel in Focus

The plot

A beadle is an officer whose task is to maintain order in a synagogue. Moche the Beadle, a Jew living in the Transylvanian town of Sighet, inspires a young boy, Eliezer, with an interest in mystical Judaism. Often Eliezer seeks out Moche, and the two discuss this aspect of their religion.

In 1941 an order is issued expelling all the foreign (i.e., non-Hungarian) Jews from Sighet. Moche the Beadle, a foreigner, is forced into a cattle car and shipped away. The Jews of Sighet lament the deportations, but resign themselves. “What can we expect,” one of them comments, “It’s war” (Wiesel, Night, p. 17).

A few months later Moche the Beadle, who has been wounded but survived, returns with horrific tales about mass graves and genocide. The people of Sighet scoff at him, insisting that he seeks only to win their pity. They believe rather clandestine Allied radio broadcasts from London, which daily report on the bombing of German cities and the imminent Allied victory.

By 1944 tidings from the Russian front of Hitler’s looming defeat reassure the Jews of Sighet. News from Budapest that the Hungarian leader Horthy has been forced to cede power to the Nyilas Party fails to alarm them. Even when German soldiers move into Hungary they insist, “The Germans won’t get as far as this” (Night, p. 20). But a few days later German soldiers arrive in Sighet. The Jews are soon driven into a ghetto. Even in the squalor of the ghetto many remain optimistic, repeating their confident assertion that the Soviet armies will soon arrive.

The order to begin deportations crushes all remaining hope. The Jews of Sighet are herded into cattle cars. They have barely enough room to breathe, let alone sit or lie down. One woman begins to cry out “Fire! I can see fire!” (Night, p. 35). Fearful that her irrational outbursts might provoke the guards, the others bind and gag her. As they arrive in Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz, she cries out again. The deportees peer through the crevices in the wagons to see flames leaping from a tall chimney. In the air is the stench of burning flesh.

At Birkenau Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sisters. Eliezer and his father are sent to Auschwitz along with the others deemed fit to work. The rest of the deportees are sent to the gas chambers.

Arriving at the barracks, the two are stripped and shaven. Early in the morning all the new arrivals are forced to run naked through the snow to another barracks. They are disinfected with petroleum and then given a hot shower. Again naked, they then must run, through the snow, to another barracks where they are given clothing. A Nazi officer warns them:

You are at Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It’s a concentration camp. Here, you have got to work. If not, you will go straight to the furnace. To the crematory. Work or the crematory—the choice is in your hands.
(Night, p. 47)

Veteran prisoners tattoo the arms of the new inmates with identification numbers. After three weeks Eliezer and his father are transported to another labor camp, Buna. Veteran prisoners of Buna assure the new arrivals that Buna is a good camp. In Buna Eliezer is assigned, along with his father, to work in a warehouse for electrical equipment. Other inmates warn “the work isn’t in the least difficult or dangerous. But Idek, the Kapo, has bouts of madness now and then, when it’s best to keep out of his way” (Night, p. 57). When Idek happens to vent senseless rage on Eliezer’s father, Eliezer is surprised to notice that his anger is toward his father for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outburst.

An electric power station at Buna is blown up, and the Gestapo discovers hidden arms and arrests three suspects. One is a young Dutch child. All three are hanged, but the little boy’s body is too light to break his neck. For over an hour he dangles, struggling between life and death. Eliezer hears a man ask “Where is God now?”—and the answer comes, “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows” (Night, p. 71).

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Eliezer cannot bring himself to join in the blessing of a God who “in His great might had

created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna” (Night, p. 73). Soon after, Eliezer and his father narrowly escape a selection in which weakened prisoners are removed for extermination.

In the winter, Eliezer’s foot swells because of the cold. A Jewish doctor, a prisoner in the camp, insists that he should undergo an operation. Eliezer is sent to the hospital, where other patients warn him, “there’s selection here too. More often than outside. Germany doesn’t need sick Jews” (Night, p. 83). Fortunately, Eliezer’s operation is a success.

While Eliezer is still confined to the hospital, rumors spread that the Russian army is nearing Buna. The Nazis plan to evacuate the camp, leaving behind the sick and infirm. Fearful that the Germans will merely blow up the camp and slaughter the invalids, Eliezer and his father decide to join the prisoners whom the Nazis are evacuating. Two days after the evacuation, the patients that stayed behind are freed by the Russian armies.

After marching for days through the snow on his bandaged foot, Eliezer arrives with the other prisoners at Gleiwitz, Poland. After three days without food or water and another selection, the prisoners are crammed into cattle cars and taken to Germany, to the Buchenwald concentration camp. During the long journey they fight for the food that is casually tossed in by loitering German civilians; many are killed in the struggles.

At Buchenwald Eliezer’s father falls ill with dysentery. Other prisoners in his block beat him and take his portion of bread. On January 29 he is carried away to the crematory. Eliezer speculates that he may still have been alive.

Evacuations to other camps begin. On April 10, a final evacuation of the remaining 20,000 Buchenwald prisoners is thwarted by Allied bombers. On the morning of April 11, 1945, an underground resistance movement wrests power from the few remaining Nazi commanders, and by that evening the first American troops arrive at Buchenwald.

Nazi duplicity

Upon arrival at Birkenau, Eliezer is astonished to hear a prisoner demand, “What have you come here for, you sons of bitches? What are you doing here?” (Night, p. 40). The enraged man continues, “You’d have done better to have hanged yourselves where you were than to come here. Didn’t you know what was in store for you at Auschwitz? Haven’t you heard about it? In 1944?” (Night, p. 40). Only after the war could Eliezer have learned that two men, Vrba and Wetzler, had escaped from Birkenau with the specific purpose of warning the Hungarian Jews. Only after seeing the electric fences and the guard towers could he have understood that for two men to escape Auschwitz, it required the collaboration and even the sacrifice of many others. Only after the war could he have read the documents detailing the process of extermination at Auschwitz, documents that never made it into the hands of most Hungarian Jews.

Yet the Jews of Sighet had been warned. A survivor of the massacres in the Ukraine had urged them to flee. To understand their reluctance to believe him, one must comprehend the Nazi penchant for deception. The Nazis encouraged complacency, assuring the Jews of Sighet that in the ghettos they would be self-governing and free from the threat of anti-Semitism. Before deportation, they told the Jews that they were being shipped to labor camps in Germany. Even on the threshold of the gas chambers, Jews were encouraged to hurry into the “showers” before the water got cold.

Sources

After the war Wiesel swore not to speak or write of his experiences for ten years. This he considered

[l]ong enough to learn to listen to the voices crying inside my own. Long enough to regain possession of my memory. Long enough to unite the language of men with the silence of the dead.
(Wiesel in Estess, p. 8)

In 1954, working as a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Wiesel interviewed the distinguished Catholic novelist François Mauriac. Listening to Mauriac extol the sufferings of Christ, Wiesel rose up and exclaimed:

I want you to know that ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more, than Christ on the cross. And we don’t speak about them. Can you understand that, sir? We don’t speak about them.
(Wiesel in Estess, p. 12)

Mauriac implored Wiesel to tell his story, insisting “You are wrong not to speak.... Listen to the old man that I am: one must speak out” (Mauriac in Estess, p. 13). In 1955 Wiesel sent Mauriac the manuscript for And the World Remained Silent, a Yiddish-language account of his sufferings. A shortened version, Night, was published in 1958, including a preface by Mauriac.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

War crimes trials and the Gruenwald-Kasztner trial

After World War II the Allied forces brought to trial many former Nazi officials, including the commandant of Auschwitz. Among the charges were persecution, deportation, enslavement, and extermination, all classified as crimes against humanity that carried a penalty of death. Some of the worst Nazi culprits escaped judgment. Hitler was already dead. Other prisoners committed suicide before their trials. Some, notably Eichmann, had simply vanished. In 1953, just before Wiesel began to speak publicly of his experiences, Milchiel Gruenwald, a seventy-two-year-old man living in Israel, distributed a small pamphlet accusing Rezso Kasztner of collaboration with the Nazis. Gruenwald maintained that Kasztner had testified on behalf of Nazi criminals in preliminary hearings before the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg, Germany. Because Kasztner’s testimony was not used in the public war crimes trials, the fact of his Nazi collaboration was not common knowledge and came as a shock to the public. Kasztner, then an official in the Israeli government, was persuaded by his colleagues to sue Gruenwald for libel. Gruenwald’s lawyer, Schmuel Tamir, could only win an acquittal by proving first that Kasztner had testified on behalf of a Nazi at Nuremberg, and second that Kasztner had collaborated with the Nazis, Israel’s only capital crime.

Although Kasztner angrily denied Gruenwald’s allegation that he had come to the rescue of Nazis, Tamir found old letters in which Kasztner himself insisted he was personally responsible for the release of Kurt Becher, a German official accused of massacring Jews in Russia and Poland.

Survivors from Kluj verified Gruenwald’s allegation that Kasztner’s cooperation with the Nazis had cost countless lives. They testified that after the war “there was a violent feeling against Dr. Kasztner. If he had showed himself in the street he would have been killed... [b] ecause he was the man who misled the Jews to believe in the good intentions of the Germans” (Hecht, p. 109).

To Tamir’s question, “Is it true, Dr. Kasztner, that some people in Budapest warned you that all your negotiations with Eichmann were only for the purpose of distracting the Jews from the knowledge of their extermination,” Kasztner conceded, “Yes, there were such opinions expressed. And I also felt the same thing in my heart” (Hecht, p. 115).

The judge in the case acquitted Gruenwald, adding “one cannot estimate the damage caused by Kasztner’s collaboration and put down the number of victims which it cost Hungarian Jews” (Hecht, p. 181). The state of Israel then prepared to put Kasztner on trial. Kasztner’s flamboyant career ended, however, before the trial. On March 3, 1957, Zeev Eckstein, a young man influenced by the political turmoil, assassinated Kasztner in Tel Aviv.

The survivors

Wiesel said of his own work, “having survived by chance, I [am] duty bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life” (Wiesel in Rosenfeld and Greenberg, p. 201). “After the war,” he explained, “I absorbed, unwittingly, perhaps unconsciously, the obsession to tell the tale, to bear witness” (Wiesel in Estess, p. 9). His writing enabled him to preserve the events that he insisted must not be forgotten, although he conceded “Treblinka and Auschwitz cannot be told.... God knows I have tried” (Wiesel in Rosenfeld and Greenberg, p. 204).

Simon Wiesenthal, also a survivor of the Holocaust, agreed with Wiesel that he had an obligation to the dead. “I am forever asking myself,” Wiesenthal wrote, “what I can do for those who have not survived” (Wiesenthal, p. 351). Wiesenthal’s answer was to seek out and bring to trial Nazi officials who had evaded arrest after the war. In 1947 Wiesenthal founded the Jewish Documentation Center, where he collected and stored material exposing Nazi war criminals. Letters from Holocaust survivors often helped him ferret out former Nazis in foreign countries and bring them to trial in Europe or Israel. One of his most famous triumphs was the capture in South America of Adolf Eichmann, who was tried and convicted in Israel in 1960.

Reception

Critics compared Night with the already famous Diary of a Young Girl (also covered in Literature and Its Times), the recollections of Anne Frank’s experience in hiding. Wiesel’s account was welcomed as a newly shocking narrative and a sober reminder that behind all the statistics were millions of personal tragedies. The most interesting aspect of the story, one review claimed, was the people’s unwillingness to believe Moche the Beadle’s warnings. “One can hardly blame them,” the review argued, for “even today when the facts have long since been established beyond any shadow of doubt we find it almost impossible to credit that human beings could both inflict and endure suffering on the scale which Mr. Wiesel describes” (Times Literary Supplement, p. 523).