Night

The symbol of fire recurs several times in the narrative. First and foremost, it represents death and destruction in their most terrifying forms. The fire leaping out of the crematorium chimney and the burning pits at Auschwitz consume the bodies of the Jews that have died there. For the arriving deportees from Sighet, it is the embodiment of their deepest fears that they and their families will die in the crematoria. The terrible flames that Madame Sighet sees outside the window of the cattle car taking the Jews to Auschwitz is a premonition of the crematoria and the death awaiting them at the concentration camp. Her terrifying and unnerving vision recalls the fires of hell, and like fire, her madness threatens to spread by contagion to all the other occupants of the car. Fire thus connotes physical, mental, and spiritual destruction.

Earlier in the memoir, as the Jews await their deportation from Sighet, Eliezer describes the stars as “sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes” (31). Here, the element of fire takes on another meaning, representing the human spirit itself. In this complex image, Eliezer connects the nighttime stars with the individual lives of the members of his community. The fire from which the stars spring is a metaphor of the essence, divine in origin, of that community.

The motif of silence appears throughout Night and is related to the symbol of night and the theme of dehumanization in the book. Wiesel uses the trope in both a literal and metaphorical sense; silence is the physical absence of sound and also moral silence. Silence has many significations; it represents the inability to speak, to understand, and to struggle under the conditions of Nazi brutality. Silence is the result of fear, ignorance, and apathy. Ignored by the Jews of Sighet, even Moché the Beadle becomes silent, weary that his warning about the coming danger falls on deaf ears. Brutalized and dehumanized by the Nazis, the Jews are silenced both literally and metaphorically. Physical exhaustion and starvation render them silent, and their silence epitomizes the crushing of the human spirit.

Silence is a negating force; Eliezer notes uncomfortably that there is an oppressive silence when an SS officer addresses the newly-arrived deportees at Auschwitz. Cowed by intimidation, Eliezer is silent when his father is beaten by the gypsy at Birkenau and does not respond when his father calls his name after his skull has been fractured at Buchenwald. The memories of the prisoners grow silent under the numbingly-harsh conditions of camp life; they no longer think of their absent loved ones. Silence is thus a moral failure, but it is also the consequence of apathy, as the prisoners succumb to extreme physical and spiritual fatigue.

Ultimately, silence means death. Juliek’s beautiful violin solo, which seems to Eliezer the final outpouring of Juliek’s soul, is all the more striking as it arises from a silent background in a shed crowded with dead and dying bodies. Silence also represents the absence or death of God, who does not intervene as his people are massacred by the Nazis.

Anonymity conveys the theme of dehumanization in Night. As the Jews are progressively stripped of their human identity as individuals, they become anonymous. An important example of this is the tattoo inscribed on each prisoner’s arm, which effectively reduces the individual to an identification number. Eliezer is given the number “A-7713,” after which his name is effectively erased. As the narrative unfolds, its geographical landscapes become increasingly littered with the anonymous bodies of corpses that have fallen victim to the Nazis. In the strange, dreamlike world of the concentration camp, anonymous and faceless voices warn of dangers, as if from beyond the grave. Eliezer himself is almost murdered by an anonymous assailant who strangles him without apparent cause. Fate itself is an anonymous force, since the God to which the Jews pray and whose name they bless seems to have abandoned them.