Elie Wiesel, The Night: book review with summary, setting and time, characters and personal commentary on the text.
Elie Wiesel’s Night begins with little Eliezer discussing “mysticism” with old Moshe the Shammàsh .
One day, foreign Jews are expelled from Sighet in Transylvania, the town where the Wiesel family lives. After a while, however, the old man manages to return and tells of his experience as a deportee. Suddenly, news arrives that in a few days they would have to leave for a destination unknown to anyone except the president of the Jewish Council.
The inhabitants of Sighet are then loaded onto the wagons of some trains. The day of departure of the Wiesels (parents and two children) also arrives. Only upon arrival do they learn what their destination is: the concentration camp of Birkenau . Everyone is stripped of their valuables and at the entrance they are divided into men and women. Little Wiesel remains with his father without knowing that he would never see his mother and his little sister Zipporah again.
A cloud of smoke is seen coming from a chimney . Before arriving at the moment of the first selection, a stranger suggests that the two protagonists falsify their ages: Elieser should pretend to be eighteen and his father forty. When they arrive at the selection, they follow the advice: later on, in fact, they will learn that children and weak old people are burned in that chimney.
They are stripped of their valuables and clothing. Gestapo agents force them to march naked through the camp during a heavy snowfall. The deportees are disinfected with petrol and then washed with hot water, then escorted with machine guns pointed to their barracks. A few days later they are transferred to the Auschwitz camp .
There they find a block leader who is more humane than the one in Birkenau and begin to have a glimmer of hope for liberation. After a few days they move to the Buna camp. At the entrance to the block that was assigned to them they are marked with a number that replaces their name. Then comes the visit to the dentist, where Eliezer loses the gold crown that is in his mouth.
One day Eliezer’s block is given to a boy named Franek, who gives them the opportunity to do what they want. Eliezer, walking, discovers his block leader in a moment of intimacy with a girl and for this he is whipped . One day the news arrives that some Russian bombs had fallen on Buna destroying some buildings. The next day two prisoners are hanged for stealing during the alarm: Eliezer remains indifferent, but this does not happen when he sees the hanging of a little boy who did not die immediately but remained on the brink of death for a few minutes under the gaze of all the prisoners.
Eliezer begins to despise God and everything related to him . The time comes for yet another selection. Fortunately, father and son pass the selection. One day, seeing that his foot was swollen, Eliezer goes to the doctor who operates on it to avoid amputation.
the boy remains in the hospital until news of a new bombing arrives. He runs away from the hospital fearing a new selection that he would not have passed given his conditions.
The SS decide to evacuate the camp and a long march begins where many prisoners die crushed by the fleeing mass. At a certain point they are loaded back onto a train bound for Buchenwald. Arriving at the new camp, they are all exhausted by the fatigue of the race, hunger and thirst. Shortly after, a hot shower awaits them, but many, including Elie’s father, do not have the strength to make it given the crush of bodies fighting to secure the first places for the showers.
The boy understands that the much feared separation from his father is approaching given his critical physical and mental conditions. One day, when he wakes up, he no longer finds his father but another man: he then understands that his father has been taken to the crematorium.
On April 5, 1945, the camp loudspeakers announced to the deportees to go to the square, but it began to dawn on some people that it was just an excuse to shoot them all, so many hid. The meeting in the square was postponed every day for six days, during which the prisoners ate grass since the distribution of soup had stopped . On the sixth day, an American tank crossed the gate of the camp: it was liberation . Elie was struck by poisoning and had to fight with death for several days, but gathering his last strength he got up from his hospital bed and looked at himself in the mirror: he saw nothing but a corpse.
THE NIGHT: BOOK CARD
The narrator of the book is internal (it is the protagonist himself). The genre is autobiographical .
The book is set in the town of Sighet and the concentration camps , in the final year of the Second World War.
The language is very simple and fluent. There is no use of complex words, but there are some terms in German and Hebrew in italics, perhaps to make more evident the gap that the war created between the two cultures. The harsh language used in some parts of the text (the climax ones) gives the idea of the author’s contempt for the Nazis.
Basically this work has its own charm, also given by a thread of mystery about the terrible adventures that millions of deportees had to endure. The negative point, which however is not specifically aimed at this book but at all those that deal with this subject, is the fact that the stories tend to all resemble each other and now, even at the beginning of the book, you can guess the ending. This is not meant to be a criticism of the book, since this subject has always interested me, despite its crude content.
