Discussion Topic
Setting and Historical Context of Night
Summary:
Night by Elie Wiesel is set during World War II, beginning in 1941 in Sighet, a Transylvanian town now part of Romania. The memoir chronicles Wiesel's experiences as a Jewish teenager during the Holocaust. The setting transitions from a peaceful Jewish community to the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Wiesel's narrative captures the abrupt shift from normalcy to terror, starting with the deportation of Jews and culminating in their liberation by American forces in April 1945.
What is the setting of Night?
Section 1 of Night, a book by Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel, begins in 1941, at the outset of World War II, in the Jewish ghetto in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania. The town is now named Sighetu Marmației and is part of Romania.
The first section of the book ends in the spring of 1944, with Jews from the Sighet ghetto, including fifteen-year-old Elie Wiesel and his mother, father, and three sisters, being loaded into cattle cars on trains that are destined for the concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland.
In section 2, the train travels through Hungary to Kaschau, at the Czechoslovakian border, and after several days, the train arrives at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz. The prisoners are told that Auschwitz is a comfortable work camp where families can stay together.
Section 3 recounts the processing of Elie's family at Birkenau, where Elie...
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and his father are separated from his mother and sisters.
I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister's fair hair ... and I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever.
Elie and his father remain in Birkenau for three weeks. In August 1944, Elie and his father are marched to the work camp at Monowitz (also known as Buna or Auschwitz III), the largest Auschwitz sub-camp, which, according to the narrator, is a four-hour walk west of Auschwitz.
Sections 4 and 5 of the book are set in the Buna sub-camp, where Elie and his father remain until word of the Russian army approaching the camp prompts an evacuation of the camp.
As Wiesel recounts in section 6, in January, 1945, the Germans decide to abandon the concentration camps in Poland so that the approaching Russian army can't liberate the prisoners. The Germans put 60,000 prisoners on a thirty-five-mile "death march" to the train station at Gleiwitz, in southern Poland.
Section 7 is set in Gleiwitz, where the prisoners spend two days and nights in crowded, unheated barracks without food or water. The survivors are then loaded into cattle cars for the ten-day journey to the Buchenwald concentration camp in east-central Germany.
In section 8, still in Buchenwald, Elie's father dies from dysentery.
His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond.
I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like—free at last!
In the final section of the book, section 9, the 20,000 prisoners in Buchenwald have been given no food for six days, and some of the prisoners attack the guards and SS officers and take control of the camp. At six o'clock that evening, April 11, 1945, American tanks and troops arrive at Buchenwald and liberate the surviving prisoners, just three months after Elie's father died.
What is the setting and year for the first section of Night, and what was happening in Europe then?
Night by Elie Wiesel is a first person memoir detailing Wiesel's experience of the Holocaust as a Hungarian Jew. The story begins in 1941 in Wiesel's hometown of Sighet that was originally part of the Hungary but is now part of present-day Romania. The first major impact of the Nazis on the town was when Wiesel's teacher Moshe was deported, and destined for a concentration camp, but managed to escape the Nazis, return to Sighet, and warn his fellow Jews what was in store for them. Slowly, the Jews suffered increasing civic disabilities, being isolated into ghettos, deprived of property and civil liberties, and forced to wear yellow stars.
In 1944, Wiesel and his family were sent to the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland, where his mother and sister were killed and he and his father endured slavery and forced labor. In 1945, as the Russian Army advanced, father and son were evacuated to the Buchenwald camp in Germany; although the father died on the forced march, the son survived to be liberated on April 11, 1945.
The main events of the book, therefore, are the rise of the Nazis and World War II.
How does Elie Wiesel establish the setting of Night in the opening chapter?
Any memoir of life in a concentration camp during World War II needs little embellishment to establish setting or tone. In his memoir of his time in German concentration camps, Night, Elie Wiesel begins by providing an almost idyllic portrait of life within the Jewish community of the Transylvanian town of Sighet. The war raging across much of Europe has yet to touch this tiny corner of the world, and the young Elie and his family live their lives with a great degree of normalcy. Early in Chapter 1, Wiesel writes, regarding his and his siblings' routine: "My parents ran a store. Hilda and Bea helped with the work. As for me, my place was in the house of study, or so they said." And so begins the author's brief description of his life. The setting, if not ideal, is certainly reasonably tranquil. Wiesel discusses his relationship to God, and the role in his Jewish studies of Moishe the Beadle, the community's poorest but most spiritual citizen. In a particularly prescient passage, Wiesel quotes (paraphrases, actually) his new-found tutor:
"Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don't understand His replies. We cannot under- stand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and re- main there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself."
The reason that this passage can be considered prescient is because of the disillusionment amid the horrors of the Holocaust that will cause the teenage Elie to reject the notion of a just God protecting His people. This revelation, however, lies in the future. For now, suffice to say that Wiesel is emphasizing his own growing spirituality and the significance of Moishe the Beadle in sparking greater interest in the study of God and religion. This tone, uplifting, confident, comfortable, is abruptly interrupted with the following:
"AND THEN, one day all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet. And Moishe the Beadle was a foreigner.
"Crammed into cattle cars by the Hungarian police, they cried silently. Standing on the station platform, we too were crying. The train disappeared over the horizon; all that was left was thick, dirty smoke."
The Holocaust has reached Sighet. The community's Jewish population, however, does not yet comprehend the scale of the threat it is facing, evident with the surprise return of Moishe the Beadle and this now-sorrowful figure's depiction of brutality and persecution on a heretofore unimaginable scale. Moshe relates the deportation of many of the region's Jews, himself included, and their mass execution at the hands of the German Gestapo in a forest:
"Without passion or haste, they shot their pris- oners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place in the Galician forest, near Kolo- may. How had he, Moishe the Beadle, been able to escape? By a miracle. He was wounded in the leg and left for dead . . ."
Moishe the Beadle, fortunate to have escaped the slaughter, has been transformed from a poor but tranquil soul into the lonely, ignored voice of impending doom. As Moishe warns Sighet's remaining Jews of the horrors that await them, he is written-off as an eccentric unable to distinguish between fiction and reality.
Wiesel's abrupt transitions from tranquility to horror reflect the environment in which he and his family lived. The war had been a distant, almost abstract reality, the Final Solution a figment of the town fool's imagination. Moishe's warnings, however, are credible, and Wiesel continues in this opening chapter to track the continued deterioration in his town's fortunes as the German Army finally descends upon Sighet. The horrors of the Final Solution have reached Wiesel and his family and the reader is fully aware, given the historical nature of this memoir, that the worst is yet to come.
In the book Night, Elie Wiesel uses several ideas to establish the setting. At the beginning of Chapter 1, when Moishe the Beadle is being described, the author also describes the town of Sighet, a small Jewish town in Transylvania. Elie describes the transporting of the foreign Jews from his small town, which illustrates the German intent to capture and transport the Jews; at this point, the setting in which they gather Jews together to transport them, even in the cold, is established. Elie describes sitting with Moishe when he returns from his exile and persuades Moishe to teach Elie. He also describes sitting with his family listening to the London radio broadcast. Elie describes the eight days of Passover, the German entrance into their town, the imposition of the yellow star, and most of all, the creation of the ghettos. Two ghettos are created and in a very casual way, Elie outlines all the changes for the Jews, such as giving up space in their homes for relatives who lost their homes.
Each change that Elie describes gives readers another look at the setting, from the beginning where life is good and no one is fearful, to the creation of the ghettos and finally, the fearful boarding of the trains.