Night Section One
Eliezer Weisel is a twelve-year-old boy in1941, he lives in a small town called Sighet in Transylvania, Hungary. He’s a scholarly child who is devout in his study of the Talmud, the Jewish Oral law. His parents are orthodox Jews, with three daughters and Eliezer is their only son. They are shopkeepers, and his father is a highly respected man in the community. Eliezer asks his father to find him a teacher for his study of the Kabbala, the Jewish mystical texts that interpret the bible. Eliezer’s father refuses to find him a teacher as he feels that Eliezer is far too young to be studying the Kabbala, texts that are generally taken by adults after their thirtieth year. Eliezer remains undeterred and finds an unlikely teacher in Moishe the beadle, a pauper from the village. Moishe rarely interacted with anyone in the village, but Eliezer had often heard him talking to himself about divine suffering. Moishe begins to teach Eliezer about the ways of the mystic. He teaches Eliezer that God lay in the self and that his interaction with God involved asking himself the right questions about the nature of life as well as existence.
Moishe is expelled from Sighet when the Hungarian government begins to move against foreign Jews. He spends several torturous months as a captive to the Germans, as the Hungarian government hands him over to them along with the other foreign Jews. However, Moishe manages to escape and he journeys back to Sighet to warn the other Jews about the horrific methods of Nazi Germany. However, none of the people in Sighet believe that Moishe’s account warrants any action. In 1944, the Hungarian government falls into the hands of the fascists, and they begin to move against the Jews in the capital. The people of Sighet are worried by the action but they do not believe that the Germans will journey so far to enact any kind of action against the Jews living in Sighet. Alas, their conclusions turn out to be incorrect as German soldiers move into Sighet soon after the fall of the government. They treat the people with considerable politeness, in the beginning, however, they soon begin issuing directives for the Jewish population. They halt their ability to move freely and possess items of value. Many Jewish families bury parts of their wealth when the Germans begin to confiscate their possessions. The Germans then create ghettos in the town and separate them from the rest of the town with Barbed wire. All Jews are forced to live in extremely close quarters in the Ghetto.
Eventually, Eliezer’s father learns that the Germans have decided to move them to concentration camps. They are told to leave behind all their possessions and simply carry whatever they could carry on their backs. The following day, all the people in the ghettos are expelled onto the streets and forced to wait in the hot sun while extraction is carried out in groups. Eliezer’s family is among the last transports that leave Sighet, which takes them to Auschwitz.
The conditions in the cattle cars are terrible, everyone is packed in tightly so that there is barely any air to breathe and oppressive heat. Everyone is thirsty, hungry, and tired since no one has enough space to sit down. Some of the people begin to lose their sense of social decorum, as they begin to openly flirt with one another and make love. They travel in these oppressive conditions for days, and they reach the Czechoslovakian border which is when they realize that they are not simply being relocated. A German official addresses them, he tells them that they have to give up all of their valuables immediately and that whoever was found to have disobeyed the order, would be killed. They are also warned not to escape. The doors to the cattle pens are nailed shut and the train sets off once more, but the occupants have no idea about where they are going.
An older woman in Eliezer’s cattle car begins to hallucinate, she suddenly begins yelling about a fire. The occupants are shocked and pitiful at first, both for the woman and her young son. However, this pity soon mutates into anger as her repeated screams about fire begin to frustrate the others. They tie her up first, and when that fails to halt her, some of the boys beat her. The repeated beatings have little effect on her, and she continues to rave periodically about a fire in the direction that they are traveling. The train stops at a station, and some of the people from the car can learn that they are traveling to Auschwitz, where they would be allowed to work and live in peace with their families. They have no other information about what happened at Auschwitz and are reassured by the information they receive at the station.
They catch a glimpse of a huge furnace as they near their final station, and are exposed to an eerie smell. They later learn that the smell is that of burned flesh. The cattle cars finally stop at Birkenau, the processing center for the arrivals at Auschwitz.
Analysis
Eliezer Weisel’s account of the holocaust was first put down by the author in Yiddish, and that first volume had been nearly 800 pages long. Upon translation, Eliezer cut down the account to some 100 pages, and critics argue that this was done mostly due to the influence of his editor, Francois Mauriac. They argue that Mauriac’s influence led to Night being focused on faith, whereas the original Yiddish version was more condemning of Nazi Germany.
The author informs us that his purpose in writing his account is to bear witness to the horrific acts of the holocaust so that such evil could never again find purchase in the world. This theme of bearing witness, and preventing scenarios like the holocaust is developed even though the character of Moishe the beadle. The Jews of Sighet refuse to believe him, and they suffer dire consequences for their dismissal of his account. The people of Sighet are repeatedly disbelieving in the atrocities that are credited to the Nazis, perhaps because the acts in themselves are so fantastically gruesome.
Inhumanity is another theme that Night explores. Eliezer’s account of the cattle cars reveals how inhumanity propagates. The Nazis treat the Jews like animals by exposing them to horrific conditions, these people then begin to behave with the same cruelty that they are forced to contend with. They begin to lose their sense of social decorum as some of them start having sex in the cars. They beat the lady that screams at them about the fire that they are approaching.
