"Night" by Ellie Wiesel

Zak Turner

To start things off in my book, Wiesel start off by saying how he, along with many other holocaust survivors feel the moral obligation as a witness of what transpired in those years, to inform people of how it easily it began to keep something like that from ever happening again. In order to keep such an event from ever taking place again, one must make sure the generations afterwards remember what happened. One must learn history to prevent it from ever happening again. This is  ultimately Wiesel's goal while writing "Night".

 

Wiesel begins by recounting the months leading up to his imprisonment at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The year was 1944 when a small village in Poland first got wind of what was going on in the rest of the world when a Jew from the village returns from a mysterious absence. He warns the Jews of the village of the ongoing threat, how he personally was forced to escape a firing squad led by Nazi Germans against innocent Jews. Naturally the Jewish population of the town wrote him off as having "lost it" or hallucinating. A few weeks later, as predicted the Jews are forced into a small area in the town, only about 4 streets, which they call a ghetto.

 

However, the Jews of the town see their confinement to the ghetto as a good thing. They quickly establish a form of government known as the council. Soon after, they are forced to wear yellow stars on their shirts, the argument against being worried about this new injustice being " The yellows stars aren't lethal". Just demonstrating how easy it was for them to be tricked into the concentration camps.

 

One night, a few weeks after the Jews were moved into the ghetto under "protection" they are awaken at unearthly hour and told they had a few hours to pack as much as they could, and that they were being transported to a remote location. They are taken at the behest of the Polish soldiers to a smaller ghetto a few miles from the main one. After a week of waiting, Eli, his Mother, his Father and his little sister are forced into cattle cars like animals and begin their long journey to Auschwitz. where (despite him knowing) Eli sees his mother and his little sister for the very last time. There Eli and his father pass selection, selection being the choice of the soldier at the front gate of whether or not you would burn in the furnaces or work in hell.

 

He spends the next few years of his life attempting to keep faith in G-d while keeping his gravely weakened father alive, with the after thought of keeping his own diminishing health up. Against all odds, Eli manages to make the brutal journey from Auschwitz to Buna, along with his father, A journey that started off with over 100 men left only twelve men (barely) standing. However after a few weeks in Buna, Eli wakes up one morning to a father who wont and Eli is ultimately on his own in the world. Eliezer Wiesel was 16 when his father passed away.