Night

What's inside (10 sections)

1. Sighet before the war
2. The ghetto and the cattle car
3. The first night at Birkenau
4. Buna, Idek, and the selections
5. The death march to Buchenwald
6. The father's last night
7. Liberation, and the boy who could not weep
8. What the book leaves out
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

I put this one off for years because I assumed it would shout. It does the opposite. Night is a short, flat, exact book about a boy who goes to the camps and comes back. Elie Wiesel was about fifteen during the events he describes, and that is the age of the narrator. The Yiddish original, Un di velt hot geshvign, came out in Buenos Aires in 1956 at 245 pages. The French edition, La Nuit, followed in 1958 from Éditions de Minuit under Jérôme Lindon with a preface by François Mauriac and ran to 178 pages. Stella Rodway's English version, translated from the French rather than the Yiddish, was published by Hill & Wang in New York in 1960 as a first American edition of 116 pages. The year attached to the book is 1956 because that is when the original language text first appeared. Wiesel won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.

What you get is a first-person account in short sections, mostly people talking, working, waiting and being counted. You follow names and places as they arrive and supply the context yourself, which is why it reads so fast and sits so long. I will go through it in order, with the ending in.

Sighet before the war

Sighet is a town in Transylvania with a Jewish quarter built around shops, schools and Hasidic prayer houses. Eliezer studies the Talmud by day and at night runs to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple, and what he wants most is a Kabbalah master. His father says he is too young, so he goes to Moishe the Beadle, the poor caretaker of the Hasidic congregation, and they read the Zohar together in the semi-dark after everyone else has gone.

Then the foreign Jews are expelled, the Hungarian police cramming them into cattle cars while the town watches from the platform. Moishe is a foreigner. Months later he comes back, and he is no longer Moishe. The train had crossed into Polish territory and been taken over by the Gestapo, who put the deportees on trucks, drove them into a forest near Kolomay and made them dig huge trenches. The men were then shot one by one as they came to offer their necks, and the infants were thrown into the air as targets. Moishe was wounded in the leg and left for dead, and he returns to Sighet to describe his own death to people who still have time to prepare.

The town does not listen. Some say he imagines it, the rest call him mad. He pleads with them in the synagogue, weeping, and even the boy who studies with him feels only sorry for him. The family does not leave either, because the warnings arrive second hand.

The ghetto and the cattle car

The doors close in stages. Two ghettos are created, the family moves from the first into the smaller one with whatever they can carry, and then the ghetto is liquidated: at night the Jews are marched through empty streets to a brick factory on the edge of town, the men downstairs and the women upstairs, twenty-four hours in a crowd too thick to breathe.

The next morning they walk to the station, where the cattle cars are waiting. The police hand in bread and a few pails of water, nail the doors shut, and put one man in charge of each car who will be shot if anybody gets out. Eighty people to a car. Nobody can lie down and not everybody can sit, so they take turns, and after two days the thirst is worse than the heat. At Kaschau a German officer steps in, tells them to surrender gold, silver and watches on pain of being shot, and adds that if anyone goes missing the whole car will be shot like dogs.

Then the doors close and the book gives you Mrs. Schachter, whose husband and two older sons were taken on an earlier transport. On the third night she stands up in the dark and screams that she sees a fire. Her little boy clings to her skirt and cries, telling her there is nothing there, and the passengers, frightened for themselves, bind her and beat her until she is quiet by daybreak. She starts again at nightfall, and when the train finally stops the flames she was pointing at are the first thing anybody sees.

Through all of it the family stays together, which matters more than any speech about it.

The first night at Birkenau

The train stops for good at night and the doors open onto white light, fire and smoke, and a smell nobody in that car has named. An SS man with a club gives the order that splits the crowd: men to the left, women to the right. Eight short words, and that is the moment when Eliezer leaves his mother. He sees her and Tzipora walk the other way, his mother stroking his sister's blond hair, and he keeps hold of his father's hand. He never sees either of them again.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

A veteran prisoner screams that the chimney and the flames over there are where they are going. A few young men want to attack the guards and are talked down: hope is not to be surrendered even with a sword overhead. At the crossroads a monocled officer with a baton sends them where he likes, and the boy says he is eighteen and a farmer, happy only because the baton leaves him near his father. They walk toward a ditch that is burning, close enough to see what the trucks bring to it, and then, two steps from the fire, they are ordered to turn into the barracks.

Inside they are stripped, shaved and counted, and the reunions in the yard are worse than the sorting. Yehiel, the brother of the rebbe of Sighet, throws his arms around the boy and sobs; told not to waste his tears, he answers that they are standing on the threshold of death, so how could he not cry? By morning a boy of fifteen has learned the two directions the camp runs on, and that the choice can be made again tomorrow.

Buna, Idek, and the selections

Buna is work. Eliezer is put on a detail at the warehouse for electrical parts, and the days settle into counting, bad food and more counting. His kapo is Idek, who has spells of calm and spells of fury. One day the kommando is marched out to the depot instead of staying in the camp, and the reason turns out to be a room and a young Polish girl; glimpsing it, Eliezer laughs out loud. There is a roll call before quitting time, a crate, and twenty-five lashes counted out slowly while he faints and is revived with cold water.

The Oberkapo of the fifty-second cable command is a Dutchman loved by his seven hundred prisoners. Then the power plant fails, the Gestapo call it sabotage, weapons are found in his block, and the Dutchman is taken to Auschwitz and never heard from again. The boy in his service is held in solitary, tortured, and says nothing; one day there are three gallows on the Appelplatz, and because he is too light for the rope he writhes for half an hour while the camp is made to file past and look at him. Somebody behind Eliezer asks where God is, and a voice inside him answers that He is hanging here from this gallows. That night the soup tastes of corpses.

Winter brings the selection. The Blockalteste tells his block how to survive it: undress, move your limbs, put color in your face, run past the doctors and do not look at them. Eliezer runs, is not written down, and finds his father outside afterwards, who has passed too and hands him half a ration of bread. Then comes the list of numbers called to stay in camp, and his father's number is on it without his having noticed. The old man hands over his knife and spoon as an inheritance, runs after the column at the gate, and by evening he has passed a second selection. Akiba Drumer, who had been saying for weeks that his faith was gone, is taken away in an ambulance, and three days later the friends who promised him Kaddish have forgotten to say it.

The death march to Buchenwald

The order comes in January, at six o'clock in the evening, and block after block goes out through the gate into the snow. The SS run beside them shouting for speed and have orders to shoot anyone who cannot hold the pace: a man stops for a second and a quick shot ends him. Men collapse into the dirty snow and the column keeps moving. A young boy from Poland named Zalman gets terrible stomach cramps, undresses in the road and falls, and that is the image the book keeps of him.

The dead are left in the yards under snow and nobody recites Kaddish over them; sons abandon their fathers without a tear. A rabbi named Eliahu spends the march asking after the son he saw losing ground, and the boy notices the son running in front, keeping his distance, so that the only prayer left in him is never to do what that son did. The guards grow tired and the gunshots grow fewer, but the cold works steadily, and at every step somebody falls.

They reach Gleiwitz after three days without food, and at dawn on the third day there is another selection at the gate: the weak to the left, those who walk well to the right. The father is sent to the left; the son runs after him, and the confusion that follows lets a number of people change sides, among them the two of them. They wait in falling snow they may not sit in, until the train comes. In the freight wagon there are about a hundred of them, and twelve leave it. On the last day the wind and snow come in together, someone dies, and the crying spreads from wagon to wagon. Meir Katz, the strongest of them all, begins to cry for the son taken from him in the first selection, and cannot go on. Among the twelve who get off are Eliezer and his father.

The father's last night

At the entrance to Buchenwald they are counted and promised a shower, and the father wants to sit down in a pile of snow shaped like bodies, saying he cannot go on; the boy hauls him up by the arm. What follows is roll call, thin soup, and a father who repeats his son's answers to questions he did not hear.

Then the date the book gives exactly: January 28, 1945. The father, burning with fever, pleads for water from the bunk below; an officer tells him to be silent, and when he does not hear, strikes him on the head with a club. The boy lies on the upper bunk and does not move, afraid of the next blow, and angry with his father for crying and bringing the trouble down on them. The last word his father says is his name. On the morning of January 29 there is another sick man on the cot; they must have taken him away before daybreak. Eliezer writes that he did not weep, which pained him, because he was out of tears. The boy who used to run to the synagogue to weep over the Temple is now the boy who cannot.

He stays in Buchenwald until April 11, moved to the children's block, six hundred boys with only one desire, to eat. The note at the front says the Yiddish original had more on his father's death and on the liberation, left between the lines here.

Liberation, and the boy who could not weep

On April 5 the SS are late for the evening count, which has never happened, and the loudspeakers order all Jews to gather on the Appelplatz; prisoners warn each other to go back because the Germans plan to shoot them, and the underground resistance decides not to abandon the Jews. On April 10 the plan is to evacuate everyone left, a few hundred children among them, by evening and blow up the camp; sirens interrupt it. They have not eaten for nearly six days except grass and potato peels.

On the morning of April 11 the SS take their positions and start herding the last of them toward the square, and the resistance acts: gunfire, grenades, and the children flat on the floor of the block. By noon the battle is over, the SS have fled, and the resistance holds the camp. At six o'clock that afternoon the first American tank stands at the gate.

The first act as free men is to throw themselves onto the provisions. The book is explicit about what is not there: no thought of revenge, or of parents, only of bread, and the next day young men run into Weimar for potatoes and clothes with no trace of revenge. Three days later the boy is desperately ill from food poisoning and spends two weeks in the hospital between life and death. When he can get up he looks in the mirror on the opposite wall, a mirror he has not seen since the ghetto, and from its depths a corpse contemplates him, and the look in its eyes has never left him.

Nobody weeps in that ending. The tears in this book belong to earlier nights: a boy clinging to his screaming mother in the cattle car, a man sobbing on the threshold of death, a father crying while his son threatens to stop bringing him bread. If you come to the liberation waiting for a boy who cannot stop weeping, what you get instead is a boy who cannot weep at all, and bread, and a mirror.

What the book leaves out

Fair criticism starts with the language you are actually holding. The English you read is a translation of a translation, from Yiddish into French and then from French into English, first by Stella Rodway and later by Marion Wiesel, his wife. Every step narrows what was there, and the French edition, at 178 pages, is shorter than the Yiddish original at 245. Wiesel's prose is spare by design, so a reader expecting the full texture of a family, a town or a war will find that much of the history sits outside the book.

Some readers also find the flat tone hard to stay with, particularly in the middle, where work, hunger and selections blur into one another. That repetition is true to the material and it is also a cost. A book this short has to leave things out, and the choice to leave out almost everything except what one boy saw and heard is both its method and its limit.

Read it with a history book beside it, because the questions it raises are historical ones: the memoir gives you one voice at full strength and lets the rest of the century stay out of frame. That is how it can be read in an afternoon and still sit in you for weeks.

FAQ

Why is Night dated 1956 when the French and English editions come later?

The Yiddish original, Un di velt hot geshvign, appeared in Buenos Aires in 1956 at 245 pages. The French La Nuit followed in 1958 from Editions de Minuit under Jerome Lindon with a preface by Francois Mauriac, and Stella Rodway's English translation reached Hill and Wang in 1960.

How old was Elie Wiesel during the events in Night?

About fifteen during the events described, and that is the age of the narrator, from the Sighet deportations through liberation on April 11, 1945.

Is Night the whole story of what Wiesel went through?

No. The front note says the Yiddish original had more on his father's death and on the liberation, left between the lines here, and the book keeps only what one boy saw and heard.