Elie Wiesel's novel Night is an autobiographical account of his experiences in the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. In the midst of the daily toll of death and dying that Wiesel witnessed in the camps, one particular incident of death which stood out to him was when,

As we returned from work, there, in the middle of the camp, in the Appelplatz, stood a black gallows.

Two SS officers brought a prisoner out of solitary confinement—a young man from Warsaw, "tall and strong, a giant compared to me" (Night, 61), wrote Wiesel—and led him to the gallows. The young man faced the head of the camp as the verdict against him was read aloud:

In the name of Reichsführer Himmler … prisoner number … stole during the air raid … according to the law … prisoner number … is condemned to death. Let this be a warning and an example to all prisoners. (Night, 62)

In a few minutes, the execution was over and the young man was dead. The entire camp, ten thousand prisoners, was made to file past the hanged man and look at him in the face.

There were other hangings. The Gestapo found stolen weapons hidden in one of the camps, and the three prisoners who were found to possess stolen arms, including a young boy, suffered the same fate as the young man whose death Wiesel previously witnessed. (Night, 64).

One significant difference between the hanging of the young man that Wiesel first witnessed and the hanging of the other three, including the young boy, was that the young boy's weight was insufficient for the rope to break his neck and kill him when he fell through the trap door. The young boy remained hanging, "lingering between life and death" (Night, 65), for more than half an hour while the prisoners filed past him.