Elie%20Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel
Night
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Elie Wiesel (born 1928)
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Night Genre

• Genre
• Memoir
• World War II and Holocaust

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Night Setting

• setting (time) 19411945, during World War II
• settings (place)
• Eliezers story begins in
• Sighet, Transylvania (now part of Romania during
  Wiesels childhood, part of Hungary)
• The book then follows his journey through several
  concentration camps in Europe
• Auschwitz/Birkenau (in a part of modern-day
  Poland that had been annexed by Germany in 1939)
• Buna (a camp that was part of the Auschwitz
  complex)
• Gleiwitz (also in Poland but annexed by Germany)
• Buchenwald (Germany)

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• Hungary was one of the last countries that Hitler
  conquered. Thus, the book begins in 1941.

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Setting Social Conditions

• Foreign Jews expelled and killed.
• Nazis bunked in Jewish homes, distant yet polite
  giving a false sense of security
• Closing of synagogues
• Arrest of Jewish community leaders
• Jews confined to their homes for three days.
• Hungarian police confiscated gold, jewelry, and
  other objects of value.
• Jews ghettoized inside barbed wire.
• Jews taken for forced labor and deported to
  Poland to concentration and death camps.

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Night Tone

• Tone
• Eliezers perspective is limited to his own
  experience, and the tone of Night is, therefore,
  intensely personal, subjective, and intimate.
• Night is not meant to be an all-encompassing
  discourse on the experience of the Holocaust
  instead, it depicts the extraordinarily personal
  and painful experiences of a single victim.

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Night Symbols

• Symbols
• Fire
• Fire appears throughout Night as a symbol of the
  Nazis' cruel power.
• Night
• Night always occurs when suffering is worst, and
  its presence reflects Eliezer's belief that he
  lives in a world without God.

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Motifs

• Night what happens at night and what might that
  symbolize?
• Bearing Witness Which characters are witnesses
  and to what do they bear witness?
• Father-son Relationships How does Elie and his
  fathers relationship develop? Notice other
  father-son relationships in the memoir.
• Loss of Faith Notice how Elies faith in God
  changes as the book progresses. Where do these
  changes occur?
• Voice vs. Silence Who has a voice and who
  chooses to remain silent? Why might Elie Wiesel
  title his novel what he did originally (And the
  World Has Remained Silent), and why did he no
  longer remain silent?

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Themes

• Themes
• Eliezer's Struggle to Maintain Faith in a
  Benevolent God
• Silence
• Mans Inhumanity Toward Man
• The Importance of Father-Son Bonds

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Publication Background

• Wiesel first wrote a 900-page text in Yiddish
  titled Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World
  Remained Silent).
• The work later evolved into the much-shorter
  French publication La Nuit (1958), which was then
  translated into English as Night.

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Legacy of Night

• Memoir has been published in more than 30
  languages.
• Wiesel has received more than 100 honorary
  degrees from institutions of higher learning.
• He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
• He has also been awarded the Presidential Medal
  of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and
  the Medal of Liberty Award.
• President Jimmy Carter appointed him as chairman
  of the Presidents Commission on the Holocaust.
• He also became the founding chairman of the
  United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

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• Shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize, he and
  his wife, Marion, established The Elie Wiesel
  Foundation for Humanity, an organization
  dedicated to combating indifference, intolerance,
  and injustice though international dialogues and
  youth-focused programs that promote acceptance,
  understanding, and equality.

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A God Who Remembers