Night

Elie begins the memoir by describing the depth of his religious curiosity. As a young boy, he had such strong faith that he was interested in the more mystical side of Judaism that requires more...

When they arrive at Buchenwald, Eli's father is growing ever weaker. Clinging to each other's hands, they try to keep moving and keep together. The rumor is making the rounds that they are to have...

When the police come to gather the Jewish people in Elie's neighborhood, their actions reflect the way they fail to see these people as humans: The Hungarian police used their rifle butts, their...

At the beginning of Night, Elie Wiesel describes his father as a cultured, unsentimental man with a rather distant manner: He rarely displayed his feelings, not even within his family, and was...

In chapter 4, Elie recalls witnessing the horrific hanging of a young pipel, who was beloved by the prisoners in the camp. Elie describes the boy as being angelic and beautiful. After a stash of...

In Night, what makes the soup taste better than ever after the first hanging is that Elie and the others are still alive. They are allowed to return to their bunks and eat their daily ration of...

When Elie works in the warehouse, a young French girl works next to him; they never speak because he understands no French and she understands no German. One day Elie is the victim of being in the...

Simply put, what Elie means by these words is that he can never forget those horrifying experiences he endured at Auschwitz and which destroyed his religious faith forever. Prior to his...

When Elie is in the work camp, his foot swells from the cold, and a Jewish doctor tells him that he will operate on his foot. The doctor says that if Elie waits, he risks having an amputation. Elie...

Much of the irony in Night is dramatic. Dramatic irony is when the audience is aware of something that the characters within a work are not. The most famous example of dramatic irony in Night is in...

What page number this incident is on depends upon the edition of Night you are using. In the 2006 edition translated by Marion Wiesel, this scene occurs on page 54. If you are using another...

A thesis statement introduces the topic of the essay and gives the reader an idea of the supporting argument to prove the thesis. Essentially, the thesis statement is intended to summarize what the...

There are many unsettling examples of foreshadowing in Elie Weisel’s autobiographical account of his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. One example of foreshadowing appears before...

Near the end of Night, Elie Wiesel writes that on January 28, 1945, he went to sleep with father lying in the bunk below him. The next day, he awoke at dawn to find someone else in the bed. His...

It must be noted that Elie is not necessarily losing faith in the idea of the existence of God, though there are elements of this in his religious disenchantment. He is not so much becoming an...

Elie is generally ambivalent toward the beatings that his father receives. This isn't because he's uncaring in any way; it's because his natural feelings toward his father have been numbed and...

It was on arrival at Birkenau that Eliezer witnessed one of the most horrific sights that left him shocked and in disbelief. Eliezer witnessed babies being burnt alive in the crematoria. Eliezer...

Akiba Drumer makes a simple request to his fellow inmates: that they say the Kaddish for him after his death. In Judaism, the Kaddish is a hymn of praise often sung after someone has died. It is...

In chapter 7, the prisoners are packed tightly together into a train car heading towards Buchenwald, and Elie witnesses a son kill his father over a piece of bread. A few days into their journey to...

The Jewish prisoners were forced to move from the camp at Buna by the German soldiers. This was because the front came dangerously close to the camp. The prisoners were forced to run an estimated...

With the Red Army fast approaching, the Germans decide to evacuate the camp. The inmates have twenty-four hours to prepare for their imminent journey. Though Eliezer is still convalescing in the...

By the time we reach chapter 8 of Night, Elie's father is coming to the end of his life. Wracked by dysentery for which he's not receiving any treatment, the old man is so seriously ill that the...

In chapter 3 of Night, the first person to ask Elie and his father their ages is a fellow inmate. They tell him the truth, that Elie is fifteen and his father is fifty. The inmate tells them this...

Night is an autobiographical account of a Hungarian Jew's experience in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Nazi concentration camps. Jews in these camps were used as forced labor and were also subjects for...

In Night, we see how many different people have become greedy in the war. Franek sees Elie's gold crown and demands Elie give it to him. Elie comes up with a couple of reasons as to why he can't...

In Night, Akiba Drumer is a Jewish mystic and a prisoner at Auschwitz and Buna. When Elie first meets him, Akiba is extremely devout. He is noted for his rich baritone voice, which he uses to sing...

Elie lies to Stein to keep Stein’s spirits up. In a situation as shocking as the concentration camps, Elie believes that offering false hope is better than telling the truth, as the truth will...

Elie Wiesel's relationship with God in Night is a fraught and difficult one. Though he believes in God steadfastly in the beginning, that belief begins to deteriorate until he not only lacks belief...

The thought of Juliek playing the violin in such horrible circumstances is one of the most powerful points in the book. What makes this point even stronger is that there are many instances when...

At the end of Night, the prisoners were not concerned about anything but food. They had not been fed often and were starving. Once the liberation took place, all the prisoners wanted was to eat....

In Night by Elie Wiesel, the story Moshe told upon his return is of the atrocities the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews during World War II. The book opens with a description of Moshe, whom the...

There are many Biblical allusions in Night. For example, there are references to the Jewish exile in Babylon, a story told in the Bible. When Elie describes the way in which the Jewish community is...

After the New Year, the prisoners receive word of another selection process, where they will be physically examined by SS doctors to determine if they will continue working or be sent to the...

In chapter 7, Elie, his father, and the other Jewish prisoners are completely exhausted and malnourished after marching from Buna to Gleiwitz. The Nazi officers then force the prisoners into...

The Wiesel family's initial chance to escape the Holocaust takes place in chapter 1 after Moishe the Beadle returns from miraculously surviving a Nazi firing squad. Moishe the Beadle urges the...

Right at the end of Night, Elie looks at himself in the mirror, the first time he's done so since he and his family were forced to leave the ghetto along with the other Jews bound for Auschwitz....

Buna was a concentration camp. Eliezer and his father were taken to Buna after staying in Auschwitz. The Buna Camp looked desolate and only had a few prisoners. The new prisoners from Auschwitz...

In the end of Night, Elie and his weakened father arrive at Buchenwald after enduring a forced march and a death-train transport. In the train, food was thrown into the cars by people in the...

When Eliezer arrives at Buna, Juliek explains to him that he will be working in a warehouse full of electrical materials. He also tells Eliezer that the work is not difficult or dangerous. Eliezer...

Elie's gold crown is dramatically removed by a dentist from Warsaw who uses a rusty spoon to pull it out in a lavatory. This is done to satisfy Franek, a foreman who works at the electrical...

While at the work camp of Buna, Elie witnesses several hangings. The hangings by the Nazi SS were meant to further terrorize the prisoners who already lived with death on a daily basis. Elie...

Elie Wiesel's Night is a difficult book to categorize quickly, but since it is autobiographical, it cannot be classified as fiction. Instead, Night fits into one of the following genres:...

As part of their inhuman and degrading treatment, the inmates of the camp are deliberately given insufficient food by their Nazi captors. Inmates are to be given only just enough food for them to...

A writer's purpose can usually be found in the themes that he develops in his work. In Elie Wiesel's Night, there are several themes that run throughout the work. When Wiesel writes about the...

In his novel Night, Elie Wiesel uses a lot of figurative language as the story unfolds. For instance, when Wiesel is explaining his arrival to a concentration camp, he writes, We were withered...

In Chapter 6, the Nazi officers force the Jewish prisoners to evacuate the concentration camp in the middle of a snowy night. Elie mentions that the sleep-deprived, emaciated prisoners move like...