Night by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel: Night

In his epic survival story, Night, Elie Wiesel details his experiences as a Hungarian Jew rounded up by the Nazis in the last year of the Second World War and sent with his entire family and community to concentration camps in Poland. The camps in which Wiesel suffered and in which both his parents and a sister died were only two of many used by the Nazis to implement their Final Solution to the "Jewish problem, " a mantra of the entire nation throughout the decade leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939. The greatest significance of the work is its documentation of the horrors that man is capable of inflicting on fellow man when group think, blind loyalty, and fanatical ideology corrupt entire nations.

In the first use of broadcasting technology, Joseph Goebbels, pioneered that new technology to indoctrinate a nation in virulent anti-Semitism. By the time the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, they were already well on their way of eliminating the entire Jewish race from Europe, with concentration work camps and extermination camps such as those endured by the author across all of Eastern Europe. As they occupied new territory in conquered nations like Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Rumania, and the rest of those vanquished by the Wehrmacht, the Nazis systematically isolated their Jewish inhabitants into ghettos and then shipped them off en mass to distant networks of work and death camps.

In Hungary, rumors of extermination of Jews were largely ignored as hysteria and Wiesel describes that until the Nazis deported them to the camps, many Jews in Hungarian ghettos appreciated the isolation from hostile communities infected by Nazi propaganda.

"We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A

little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office

for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department -- a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares" (Wiesel, p9).

Chances of surviving the camps depended largely on whether one was deported to a work camp or a death camp and whether one was of sufficient age and physical vitality to be of some service to the German war effort as a slave laborer. Even in the work camps, those who were weaker, older, and less susceptible to extreme deprivation and abuse succumbed to the many chronic illnesses that afflicted prisoners living in the most unsanitary and inhumane conditions imaginable.

Wiesel also describes how survival under such extreme conditions required one to give up some of the most basic human emotions and concern for others, even others in the same circumstance; this even applied to Wiesel's own emotional detachment from his father as he suffered disease and beatings by fellow prisoners and the Nazi guards before dying only a few weeks before liberation by the Allies (Wiesel, p37-38).