Background Notes for Night

Characters:

  • Elie Wiesel – main character, narrator, and author
  • Chlomo Wiesel – Elie’s father; went to Auschwitz with Elie
  • Moshe the Beadle – poor Jewish mystic; tried to warn the people of Sighet (Elie’s hometown in Romania/Hungary) of coming danger but nobody listened
  • Madame Schachter – transported on train to Birkenau; crazy or knew their fate?

About the Author: Elie Wiesel

  • Only son of a Jewish family from Sighet
  • Very religious and studied Jewish texts
  • Family sent to camps at Auschwitz and Buna, both in Poland, in 1944
  • Freed in April, 1945; 16 years old
  • Lived in a French orphanage and was later reunited with his sisters
  • Worked as a tutor, translator and journalist
  • Swore he would not write about the Holocaust
  • Interviewed a French Catholic writer and humanitarian named Francois Mauriac, who inspired Elie to break his vow of silence and write about his experiences
  • Elie wrote an 800 page Yiddish manuscript, from which came the memoir Night
  • Elie said it was “an attempt to honor the dead and find some human or divine explanation for events witnessed” and that “The only way to stop the next holocaust…is to remember the last one.”
  • Elie moved to the U.S. in 1956
  • He is a professor at BostonUniversity and does humanitarian work
  • He helped found the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
  • In 1986, Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize

Jewish Terms:

  • Torah: 1st 5 books of Bible; Jewish Bible
  • Talmud: collection of teachings of early 5th/6th century rabbis
  • Cabbala: mystical commentary on Torah
  • Rosh Hashanah: Jewish New Year
  • Yom Kippur: 10 days after Rosh Hashanah; Day of Atonement for Sins and Fasting
  • Passover: celebrates escape from slavery in Egypt
  • Yiddish: Jewish language

Other:

  • Memoir – brief autobiographical work told like a story
  • Gestapo – Hitler’s Secret Police – during the war they improsed over 30,000 Jews to create “racial purity”
  • Casualties of Concentration Camps: 6 million Jews, 5 million non-Jews
  • Victims: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Slavs, Handicapped and Disabled; Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals, Clergy, Catholics, Communists, Asocials, Political enemies, POW’s (Prisoners of War), intellectuals, professors, writers, artists, musicians – All wore identifying badges in camps and received treatment accordingly – Most cruel prisoners were placed in leadership roles intentionally

Timeline

  • World War I - left Germans poor, broken, humiliated
  • Late 1920’s - Nazi party (National Socialist German Workers Party) rose to power
  • Hitler held rallies – blamed Jews and others who were not “true” Germans for fallen state; Jewish Treatment – political strategy AND anti-Semitism (Hatred of Jews); called for an Aryan Race (Germanic peoples; blond-haired, blue-eyed)
  • 1933 -1938 – Hitler became Chancellor (leader) of Germany – restored economy and military

-1st concentration camps opened – many would die from malnutrition, starvation, or disease

-Nuremberg Laws - German Jews lost citizenship and right to work; barred from public schools and gathering places, could not marry non-Jews, suffered physical attacks to homes and businesses, forced to wear Star of David patch on clothing, forced to carry identification papers and given the middle name of Israel (males) or Sara (females); considered Jewish if had 1 Jewish grandparent

-Mass “Mercy killings” – 70,000 in asylums, 3,000 children in reform schools (orphanages), 20,000 in camps, all psych and rehab hospital patients (mentally and physically handicapped)

-War Against Ideas – suppression of labor unions and media (newspapers, magazines, radio); burning of books

  • 1938 – U.S. called conference of 31 countries to discuss refugee situation – nothing was done

-Germany began invading neighboring lands

-Night of Pogroms (Kristallnacht) – destruction of Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues throughout the Third Reich – 30,000 Jews arrested in a 2 day period and sent to concentration camps

  • 1939 – Germany invaded Poland; Britain and France declared war on Germany the next day
  • 1940 – Auschwitz opened – largest concentration camp (Auschwitz alone killed around 2 million by end of war); Birkenau (Auschwitz II) was opened about a year and a half later – it was the “reception center” for Auschwitz and a death camp
  • 1941 – Germans using camps as forced labor to fuel the war and military

-Gassing experiments were started at Auschwitz

-U.S. entered war after bombing at Pearl Harbor

  • 1942 – official policy called the “final solution” developed – work Jews until cannot work anymore and then kill

-Mass murder methods used: lethal injection, poisonous gas, shootings

-Gas chambers were added to 6 concentration camps and mass extermination began

  • 1943 – Jews and prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto as well as three concentration camps revolved, to little success
  • 1944 (June) – D-Day – Allied Forces invaded Europe

-Gassings and mass shootings escalated

-many non-Jews were sent to labor camps, while Jews were sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers

-Auschwitz was the last death camp to close down; operated through the summer of 1944

  • 1945 (Winter) – Nazis dismantled camps to cover crimes; prisoners sent on death marches to central Germany
  • 1945 (Spring) – V-E Day – Germany surrendered