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Night – Elie Wiesel - SparkNotes

E lie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania that was then part of Romania but became part of Hungary in1940. Wiesel’s Orthodox Jewish family was highly observant of Jewish tradition. His father, Shlomo, a shopkeeper, was very involved with the Jewish community, which was confined to the Jewish section of town, called theshtetl. As a child and teenager, Wiesel distinguished himself in the study of traditional Jewish texts: the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament), the Talmud (codified oral law), and even—unusual for someone so young—the mystical texts of the Cabbala.
Until 1944, the Jews of Hungary were relatively unaffected by the catastrophe that was destroying the Jewish communities in otherparts of Europe. The leader of the German National Socialist (Nazi) party, Adolf Hitler, came to power in 1933, behind campaign rhetoric that blamed the Jews for Germany’s depression after World War I. Germany embraced Hitler’s argument for the superiority of the Nordic peoples, which he (mistakenly) called the Aryan race. The country soon implemented a set of laws—including the infamous NurembergLaws of 1935—designed to dehumanize German Jews and subject them to violence and prejudice.
As World War II progressed, Hitler and his counselors developed the “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish Question—a program of systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews. By the time the Allies defeated Germany in1945, the Final Solution had resulted in the greatest act of genocide known to the world. Sixmillion European Jews had been murdered, along with millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, and others whom the Nazis considered undesirable. The greatest numbers of victims were killed in concentration camps, in which Jews—and other enemies of Germany—were gathered, imprisoned, forced into labor, and, when they could no longer be of use to their captors, annihilated. In addition to the slaughter at thecamps, millions of soldiers were killed in battle. By the end of World War II, more than thirty-five million people had died, over half of them civilians.
While anti-Jewish legislation was a common phenomenon in Hungary, the Holocaust itself did not reach Hungary until 1944. In March of 1944, however, the German army occupied Hungary, installing a puppet government (a regime that depends not onthe support of its citizenry but on the support of a foreign government) under Nazi control. Adolf Eichmann, the executioner of the Final Solution, came to Hungary to oversee personally the destruction of Hungary’s Jews. The Nazis operated with remarkable speed: in the spring of 1944, the Hungarian Jewish community, the only remaining large Jewish community in continental Europe, was deported toconcentration camps in Germany and Poland. Eventually, the Nazis murdered 560,000 Hungarian Jews, the overwhelming majority of the prewar Jewish population in Hungary. In Wiesel’s native Sighet, the disaster was even worse: of the 15,000 Jews in prewar Sighet, only about fifty families survived the Holocaust. In May of1944, when Wiesel was fifteen, his family and many inhabitants of the Sighetshtetl were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The largest and deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of more than 1,300,000 Jewish deaths. Wiesel’s father, mother, and little sister all died in the Holocaust. Wiesel himself survived and emigrated to France.
After observing a ten-year vow of silence about the Holocaust, in 1956Wiesel published Un di Velt Hot Geshvign(Yiddish for And the World Remained Silent), an 800-page account of his life during the Holocaust. In1958, he condensed his work and translated it from its original Yiddish into French, publishing it under the title La Nuit. The work was translated into English and published in 1960 as Night. Some scholars have argued that significant differences exist between Un di Velt Hot Geshvign and the...