NIGHT

1. NIGHT Section 4 Life in the Camp

2. “For God’s sake, where is God? • “WHERE HE IS? THIS IS WHERE- HANGING HERE FROM THIS GALLOWS…” • The frightening scene that concludes this section shows a small child’s murder. This young death, for Eliezer, symbolizes the murder of his God.

3. Eliezer comes to believe that a just God must not exist in a world where an innocent child can be hanged on a gallows. • Experiencing this murder brings Eliezer to the low point of his faith.

4. The death of the innocent child symbolizes the death of Eliezer’s own innocence. In the camp, Eliezer has become someone differentfrom the child hewas at the beginning of the memoir.

5. EXAMPLES: • 1. He has lost his faith. • 2. He is also beginning to lose his sense of morals and values. • 3. In a world in which survival is almost impossible, Eliezer’s most important goal is to survive for himself. • 4. He admits that he only lives to feed himself. • 5. When his father is beaten, he shows no sympathy or pity; instead he becomes angry at his father for failing to learn how to survive without attracting the attention of the soldiers.

6. Eliezer’s loss of innocence is proof of how a spiritual, loving, young boy can change under such harsh, evil circumstances.

7. FATHER-SON RELATIONSHIP • Eliezer’s relationship with his father is incredibly important to both of them, because it provides them with support. • However, though it is crucial to Eliezer to remain with his father, even this special link between father and son becomes strained under the stress of the Nazi oppression.

8. EXAMPLES: • 1. Eliezer tells the story about the thirteen-year-old boy who beats his father for making his bed improperly. • 2. It is Eliezer’s great fear that he too will lose sense of his kindness and he may turn against his father for his own survival.

9. JUMP INTO THE FUTURE • Eliezer’s encounter with the French girl who quietly comforts him after he is beaten by Idek the Kapo is unusual. It is one of the few places in the memoir where Wiesel jumps into the future to explain what happened after the liberation of the concentration camps.

10. This can be viewed as an extreme coincidence, but in Wiesel’s mind, the fact of surviving the Holocaust is in itself an unlikely coincidence, a stroke of sheer luck. The majority of concentration camp prisoners did not survive. If one can survive in the face of such great odds, then any coincidence is believable, even years later, meeting and recognizing a woman who practiced a small act of kindness.

11. Wiesel wants to make the point that his own survival is a result of luck and coincidence. • It was not that he was clever and outwitted, or defeated, the Nazis. He simply was notchosen to die.