Night by Elie Wiesel

An introduction to Judaism, the Holocaust,

and World War II.

What is the subject matter of this

sculpture? What does it look like? What emotions do you feel when you look at

it?

Jewish Terminology

• Cabbala: the Jewish mystical tradition• Hasidic: a branch of Orthodox

Judaism that maintains a lifestyle separate from the non-Jewish world

• Kaddish: A prayer associated with mourning practices (when people die)

• Rosh Hashanah: The new year for the purpose of the calendar

Jewish Terminology cont.

• Sodom: Wicked Biblical city that suffered God’s wrath

• Synagogue: A Jewish house of worship• Torah: The entire body of Jewish teachings• Yom Kippur: A day set aside for fasting,

depriving oneself of pleasures, and repenting from sins

• Zohar: The primary written work in the mystical tradition of the Cabbala.

Nazi Terminology

• Anti-Semitism: Systematic prejudice against Jews• Aryan: In the Nazi ideology, the pure, the superior

Germanic race• Death’s Head: Nazi skull symbol worn on SS

uniforms• Fascist: One who supports a political movement

that advocates a nationalist dictatorship• Gestapo: The German internal security police—

secret police• SS: An elite quasi-military unit of the Nazi party

that served as Hitler's personal guard and as a special security force in Germany and the occupied countries.

Holocaust Terminology

• Ghetto: Was a section of the city where all Jews from the surrounding areas were forced to reside. They were surrounded by barbed wire so that people were prevented from entering or leaving. Eventually all ghettos were emptied as the Jews were deported to death camps.

Holocaust Terminology

• Concentration Camp: A camp established by the Nazis for the imprisonment of all “enemies” of their regime

• Death Camp: A concentration camp which its distinct purpose was the extermination of its inmates

• Crematory: The place that contained ovens, furnaces, and chimneys, where victims were burned—alive or dead.

A Concentration Camp in Germany

Camps in Night

• Auschwitz Concentration Camp (contained three camps)

• Birkenau-an extermination camp

• Buna-a labor camp• Gleiwitz-a sub camp of

Auschwitz

These are the camps that our narrator experiences

Inside the Barracks

Almost all of the deportees who arrived at the camps were sent immediately to death in the gas chambers (with the exception of very small numbers chosen for special work teams known as Sonderkommandos). The largest killing center was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas chambers (using Zyklon B poison gas) in operation. At the height of the deportations, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Over a million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war were killed there by November 1944.

Gas Chambers

Crematorium

A watch tower, trench,

fence, and foundation barracks.

Work Makes One Free

Elie Wiesel• Born September 30, 1926 in Sighet, a small

town in Transylvania that was then part of Romania but is now part of Hungary.

• Was distinguished as a young boy as having been educated in the study of traditional Jewish texts.

• He and his family were taken from their home and moved to Auschwitz.

• After being liberated he took a ten-year vow of silence.

• He then published Night which was originally 800 pages and much more raw, angry, and pessimistic.

• It is now one of the most honored memoirs.

• The book is a cross between a memoir, fiction novel, and autobiography.

• Not everything that happens in the book happened to Elie.

• He picked unimportant details to help separate himself from the narrator.

• As you can imagine, it would have been hard to write a solely truthful, personal account.

• Wiesel wanted an emotional as well as an historical account of the Holocaust.