Night

The first chapter introduces several significant themes: the importance of religion for the young Eliezer and his subsequent crisis of faith as God seems to abandon the Jews; the complacency of the Jews of Sighet who unwittingly participate in their own destruction; the unheeded testimony of characters who witness or anticipate that destruction; and the dehumanizing consequences of brutality. Eliezer’s narrative is permeated with feelings of regret, an occasional sense of guilt, and an ironic awareness of the impending tragedy facing the Jewish community.

12-year-old Eliezer is devoutly religious, spending his days and nights studying Jewish theology and philosophy. He is attracted to the religious mysticism of the Cabbala, despite his father’s objection that he is too young to grasp its esoteric meanings. Eliezer’s religious aspiration is encouraged by Moché the Beadle, the custodian of an orthodox synagogue. Humble, poor, and deeply philosophical, Moché asks Eliezer penetrating questions—why does he pray, and why does he weep as he prays? Eliezer doesn’t know the answers; praying is like living or breathing, and he simply does it without questioning why. Moché tells Eliezer that the true answers to the most important questions come from within oneself, and each individual must discover his own path to the truth.

As Eliezer’s mentor and tutor in Jewish mysticism, Moché becomes a father figure to the young boy. Moché is very different from Eliezer’s biological father. Eliezer’s father is a cultured, unsentimental man held in high regard by Sighet’s Jewish community. Moché, by contrast, is socially inferior and marginalized in Sighet, making him an unconventional authority figure. Waif-like, “awkward as a clown” and dreamy-eyed, he is “a past master in the art of making himself insignificant, of seeming invisible” (15). Yet he has a gentle, nurturing manner and deep spirituality that give him a quiet moral authority for Eliezer. Moché’s moral authority is reinforced when he returns from his deportation to Poland, where he witnesses the horrific slaughter of his Jewish compatriots at the hands of the Gestapo. Moché’s warnings to the Jews of Sighet are ignored, however, and he is dismissed as a madman. Eliezer pities his kindly teacher but doesn’t believe his terrible tale.

When Moché returns to Sighet after his escape from the massacre in Galicia, he is a changed and haunted man: “There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or the cabbala, but only of what he had seen” (18). The atrocities he witnesses makes him a prophet of the Nazi Holocaust to the Jews of Sighet, but it also undermines his faith in God and devotion to mysticism. Just as Moché’s faith is shattered by his first-hand experience of incomprehensible brutality and violence, Eliezer’s religious faith will be crushed by the dehumanizing ordeal he, his family, and the other Jews will experience.

The Jews’ unwillingness to recognize the mortal danger posed by the Nazis is another theme in Night. At every stage of their persecution, they optimistically believe that their situation will improve, or at least not worsen, clinging to false hope even as their illusions are shattered one by one. When Moché and the foreign Jews are deported from Sighet, the incident is soon forgotten. A rumor circulates that the deportees are working in Galicia and are satisfied with their lot. As Eliezer says, within a few weeks, “a wind of calmness and reassurance blew through our houses” (17). In the spring of 1944, the end of the war seems in sight, and the Jews doubt Hitler’s resolve, let alone ability, to exterminate them: “Besides, people were interested in everything—in strategy, in diplomacy, in politics, in Zionism—but not in their own fate” (20). Even Moché the Beadle has grown silent, weary of his story being ignored by the Jewish community.

When German troops enter Hungary after the Fascists seize power in Budapest, the initial anxiety among the Jews of Sighet lapses again into complacency. Most believe the Germans will ignore the remote corners of the country, though Jews are being attacked daily in the capital. Yet within three days, German army vehicles are rolling through Sighet’s streets. The occupying Germans are polite and charming, if distant, allaying the residents’ fears. The illusion of safety is finally shattered when the community’s leaders are arrested on the seventh day of Passover: “the curtain rose[…]From that moment, everything happened quickly. The race toward death had begun” (21).

As the iron fist of German brutality and persecution bares itself to Sighet’s Jewish community, Eliezer’s narration adopts an increasingly bitter tone, rife with irony:

Some of the prominent members of the community came to see my father—who had highly placed connections in the Hungarian police—to ask him what he thought of the situation. My father did not consider it so grim […] ‘The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don’t die of it...’ (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?) (22).

As the Jews’ reaction to their worsening circumstances alternates between fearful anxiety and resignation to the increasingly oppressive and dehumanizing conditions, the irony of Eliezer’s narrative becomes more powerful. Even their confinement to ghettoes comes to be seen by the Jews as a welcome development: “Little by little life returned to normal […] We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic. […]Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers […]” (23).

While their illusion of security is willfully self-deceptive and ultimately destructive, it also demonstrates an adaptability to circumstances, enabling the confined Jews to create a reality within which they can live their lives and preserve their customs and ideals. The tension between the destructive power of self-deception and its life-affirming value is a major theme in Night.

The Jews’ reluctance to recognize the Nazi threat to their lives causes them to ignore those who warn them of the danger, another central theme in these chapters. Moché, Eliezer’s instructor in religious mysticism, takes on the role of an Old Testament prophet when he recounts his story of the massacre of the deported Jews in Galicia. His admonition falls on deaf ears, as the Jewish residents of Sighet, including Eliezer, refuse to believe him. Madame Schächter, who is terrified by her vision of a fire at night outside the train carrying Jews to Auschwitz, also functions as a prophet. The horror of the fate awaiting them is underscored by her recurring hallucination, which the other deportees take to be a sign of her insanity. They beat her incessantly, in order to stop her screaming, lest they all go mad. Yet only a madwoman could foresee the stark reality of inhuman atrocity of the crematoria at Auschwitz. Her madness conceals a visionary, prophetic power that corresponds to Moché’s unheeded testimony. When the train arrives at Birkenau, the reception center of the concentration camp, the deportees finally see the fire blazing from a tall chimney as the air reeks of the smell of burning flesh. Madame Schächter falls silent and indifferent.

Finally, dehumanization as the natural consequence of brutality is a central theme of Night. The Nazi persecution of the Jews robs them of their humanity and individuality, ultimately reducing them to the status of animals concerned only with survival. Treated as such, the norms of civilized, social behavior break down and they succumb to animal instinct. This begins to occur as the Jews are deported from the ghettoes of Sighet. Packed together in the train to Auschwitz, denied food and water, young couples copulate in the darkness amid the other deportees without shame. The brutal beating of Madame Schächter, to silence her screams, is another manifestation of this process of dehumanization.

The dehumanizing effects of racial oppression are revealed in succeeding chapters, as the Jews descend into violence, cruelty, and amoral indifference within the conditions of imprisonment and death at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel’s guilt-ridden memoir stresses the depths of inhumane behavior and stony apathy toward the suffering of others that infects the Jews, as they are stripped of human identity by the Nazis’ brutal treatment of them. As a study of the psychological effects of brutalization, Night is permeated with Eliezer’s anger at the Nazis’ dehumanization of himself and his people, and his guilt over their own inhumane behavior as a result of their treatment.