Night

Note: Although Night is not necessarily a memoir, this SparkNote often refers to it as one, since the work's mixture of testimony, deposition, and emotional truth-telling renders it similar to works in the memoir genre. It is clear that Eliezer is meant to serve, to a great extent, as author Elie Wiesel's stand-in and representative. Minor details have been altered, but what happens to Eliezer is what happened to Wiesel himself during the Holocaust. It is important to remember, however, that there is a difference between the persona of Night's narrator, Eliezer, and that of Night's author, Elie Wiesel.

ight is narrated by Eliezer, a Jewish teenager who, when the -memoir begins, lives in his hometown of Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. Eliezer studies the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) and the Cabbala (a doctrine of Jewish mysticism). His instruction is cut short, however, when his teacher, Moshe the Beadle, is deported. In a few months, Moshe returns, telling a horrifying tale: the Gestapo (the German secret police force) took charge of his train, led everyone into the woods, and systematically butchered them. Nobody believes Moshe, who is taken for a lunatic.

In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary. Not long afterward, a series of increasingly repressive measures are passed, and the Jews of Eliezer's town are forced into small ghettos within Sighet. Soon they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues. After days and nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz.

Upon his arrival in Birkenau, Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, whom they never see again. In the first of many "selections" that Eliezer describes in the memoir, the Jews are evaluated to determine whether they should be killed immediately or put to work. Eliezer and his father seem to pass the evaluation, but before they are brought to the prisoners' barracks, they stumble upon the open-pit furnaces where the Nazis are burning babies by the truckload.

The Jewish arrivals are stripped, shaved, disinfected, and treated with almost unimaginable cruelty. Eventually, their captors march them from Birkenau to the main camp, Auschwitz. They eventually arrive in Buna, a work camp, where Eliezer is put to work in an -electrical-fittings factory. Under slave-labor conditions, severely malnourished and decimated by the frequent "selections," the Jews take solace in caring for each other, in religion, and in Zionism, a -movement favoring the