Night

• Immature and hypocritical and yet Donald Trump is the leading Republican candidate.
• His statements that if elected he will build a wall along the mexican border, or that he will deport all Muslims, are not being taken seriously
• Despite continued repetition, these radical ideas are not seen as a serious threat to the future of America.

Question

“Death enveloped me, it's suffocated me. It's stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea of dying, a ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. You no longer feel the expiration pain of my food. To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing. To break rank, to let myself slide to the side of the road…”

Is it the natural human response to use death as a way to relieve pain?

Question

“But then I remember something else, his son had seen him losing ground, sliding back to the rear of the calling. He did see him. He continue to run in front, letting the distance between them become greater.… "Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength to never do what the Rabbi Eliahu’s son had done.” (109)

Is it human nature to believe in 'every man for himself'?

“All of the sudden, this pleasant and intelligent young man had changed. His eyes were shining with greed.” Do you think that these conditions of living in concentration camps brought out the bad/created hostility within good people? Or did it only allow bad people to show their true colours?

Question

Eliezer stayed in a ghetto for the majority of the begining of the novel. One of the more well known ghettos of the holocaust was the Warsaw Ghetto.

Why do you think the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto waited until 1943 after most of the inhabitants had been deported and killed to resist with weapons?

At a certain point in the novel, Eliezer contemplates the benefits of leaving his old and weak father behind instead of always watching out for him and giving him portions of his food. If you were in Eliezer’s position, would you let your father (whose health has already deteriorated) slowly become weaker until death if it means you can survive?

Question

“Was I still alive? Was I still awake? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A nightmare perhaps...Soon I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that i was back in the room of my childhood, with my books…”

Elie was a young boy when the Holocaust happened. His loss of childhood and innocence becomes unsettlingly clear in this quote. Do you think we as a society now are even capable of trying to understand what those individuals endured? As a teen in Cambridge, do we live in safe bubble?

Biography

“[...] he began beating him with an iron bar. At first, my father simply doubled over under the blows, but then he seemed to break in two like an old tree struck by lightning. I watched it all happen without moving. I kept silent. I thought of stealing away in order not to suffer the blows. [..] if I felt anger anger in that moment, it was not directed at the Kapo but at my father.” would you be able to stand there and watch a parent be beaten until the crumpled? Would you risk stepping in?

Question

• Born 1928 in Sighet (Now in Romania)
• 3 sisters; one younger and two older
• 1944 - family deported from Sighet
• Sent to a Ghetto in their home town before being deported to Auschwitz
• Mother and youngest sister killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau
• Father also died during the liquidation of the camp
• Only he and the two older sisters survived
• He studied Journalism in Paris
• Has become very out spoken on the Plight of Soviet Jewry, and Ethiopian Jewry on behalf of the state of Israel

Eliezer also thought about running into the electric barbed wire around the camp instead of dying a slow death in the flames of the crematorium.

Would you endure all the horrors of a concentration camp for the possibility of liberation, or would you give up?

Question

What did liberation mean for survivors at the end of the war? What obstacles did did they face in rebuilding their lives?

Question

Time Period

Racisim is a factor that impacts people and groups around the world. It also played a large role in the Holocaust.

How does racisim effect our lives? Has it become so casual amongst teens to make fun of someone for who they are that we don't even realize we are being racist?

Question

In the novel, Eliezer recalls a conversation with his religious teacher, stating “Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him...Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies", and "I became convinced that Moishe the Beadle would help me enter eternity, into that time when question and answer would become ONE.” What do you think is meant by this? How can a question and an answer become one?

“For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank him for?”

Elie started out as a very religious young boy. Through the Holocaust, he loses much of the faith he had, yet for some people their faith was reinforced by the events in the Holocaust. What do you think differentiates these people? What causes someone to lose faith throughout the Holocaust?

-The book was written by Elie Wiesel who lived during the Holocaust

-It put the time period, Holocaust and the feelings generated by it into perspective

-The book shows dynamics between families as they went through the Holocaust

-Night shows the intensity and pressure of living as a Jewish teenager

-Night encaptures Elie's struggle within himself and what he is scared might become of himself living in concentration camps.

Summary

Question

Jewish survivors have chosen the phrases, “Never forget”, and, “Never again”, as mottoes for remembering the Holocaust. Why do you think they chose these phrases, and do you think it is important that we never forget the Holocaust?

• Born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania
• 1942: all foreign Jews are expelled from Sighet
• 1944: First Edict: Jews could not leave their house (punishable by death) must hand over all valuables
• Second edict: all Jewish people must wear the yellow star for identification
• Forced to move into Ghettos
• Sighet -> Birkenau
• Birkenau ->Auschwitz
• Auschwitz -> Gleiwitz
• January, 1945: Gleiwitz -> Buchenwald

Parallels In Society

• “Illusions” is used in the context of perceiving a negative experience as false or more optimistic than reality
• 80% of people according to researchers gravitate toward the good outcome
• too much optimism is a danger
• Optimism blindsides

Messages of the Book

• Moishe the Beadle were ignored by the people of Sighet
• They stayed under the illusion that the danger would not reach them, that the Germans would stay in Budapest

"A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes... children thrown into the flames." (Wiesel, 32)

"Dozens of inmates were there to receive us, sticks in hand, striking anywhere, anyone, without reason." (Wiesel, 35)

"The Kapos were beating us again, but I no longer felt the pain. A glacial wind was enveloping us. We were naked, holding our shoes and belts." (Wiesel, 36)

"He threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head , throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more violent blows, until I was covered with blood." (Wiesel, 53)

Inhumanity towards humanity

Biblical Reference

Stalin

Importance of Relationships

Hitler

• Moses, during the many attempts to prove to the Pharaoh that it was God’s will for him to free the Israelites, Moses repeatedly warned the Pharaoh of what was to come.
• Even after these predicted events had come to pass the Pharaoh still ignored Moses.

• Nobody believed Stalin’s wrath against the Ukraine could get worse
• The people simply refused to comply with Stalin farm and remained stubbornly determined to return to their pre-Soviet farming lifestyle
• Stalin responded to their defiance by dictating a policy that would deliberately cause mass starvation

Struggle to maintain hope

• Due to the technology of the time, and the way politics were being reported, nobody realized how contradictory Hitler’s ‘goals’ and statements were.
• Outside of Germany nobody reacted to Hitler breaking the Treaty of Versailles (rearming Germany, invading the Rhineland), as the main goals of the European powers at this point was to keep the peace.
• There was no reaction when Germany annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, reactions only began when Germany invaded Poland.

Racism

Night

Elie Wiesel