Background for Night

1. Background for Night By Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

2. Elie Wiesel – Biographical information • Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) was born in Sighet, Romania • Sighetwas a small town in what was then part of Romania but became part of Hungary in 1940 • Today Sighet is again part of Romania • Sighet is located at the red dot on this current map of Europe • When Elie was 15 in 1944, he and his family were moved northwest to the infamous concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland

3. …Continued • Eliewas born into a family of six, with three sisters, two of whom were older • His father Schlomo owned a store in sighet and his older sisters, beatrice and hilda, worked in it. Schlomo encouraged elie to educate himself, especially in reading both literature and Hebrew. • Elie’s mother Sarah encouraged her son to spend more time in religious texts, such as the Torah, which is the central text in the religion of Judaism. Like most Jews in the village, the Wiesels were quite religious and Elie took a special interest in his faith. • Eliestudied traditional Jewish texts when he was a child and a teenager: the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament of the Christian Holy Bible), the Talmud (Jewish law), and even the very difficult texts of the Cabbala. • Cabbala: the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible, first transmitted orally and using esoteric methods (including ciphers that see the traditional Jewish texts encoded with deeper meanings). Copy of the Torah in Germany

4. The final solution in Europe • Until 1944, the Jews of Hungary (Romania) were relatively unaffected by Hitler’s actions in other parts of Europe against Jews. They had heard horrific stories from travelers of the systematic killings of Jews by nazi soldiers and even rumors of concentration camps, but villagers in towns like Sighet did not want to believe in such fantastic tales of death. • In March of 1944, however, even the Jews of Hungary became part of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Hitler became the supreme leader of Germany as Chancellor in 1933-1945, after his death from suicide as the Allies conquered Berlin. • His solution to the problem of having differences with Jewish people, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, the disabled, and others was to kill them. Hitler had more than six million people killed in Nazi controlled concentration camps, most of which were in Nazi-controlled Poland. The above map shows how the Nazis first moved families like Elie’s into “ghettos,” and then to work camps, and finally to death camps.

5. THE HOLOCAUST Over 40,000 prisons and other detention facilities were built to detain victims for the purpose of enforced slavery and mass murder. It is generally considered that these acts took place from 1941-1945 with an estimated 200,000 co-conspirators. • The Holocaust: This was an historical event which involved the attempted genocide (extermination of an entire group of people) of the Jewish people and other groups. • In the spring of 1944, members of the Hungarian (formerly Romanian) Jewish community were sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Eventually, the Nazis murdered 560,000 Hungarian Jews, which represented almost all of those Jews in Hungary at the time.

6. Elie Wiesel & Night • In Elie’s town of Sighet, out of 15,000 individuals, only some members of fifty families survived • Night is the true story written by Elie Wiesel about when he (a fifteen-year-old), his family, and many Jewish people of Sighet were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Auschwitz was the site of more than 1,300,000 Jewish deaths. • Later, he moved to the United States, and in 1963, Elie became an American citizen. • He died on July 2nd, 2016 • He has been an author, professor, and activist • He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, along with many other prestigious awards

7. Thematic concerns in Night • A number of important themes appear in night—these are just a few: • Inhumanity: humans’ inhumanity to other human beings is in full display in this novel • Incrementalism: The Nazis system of incrementally (small steps) removing human freedom • Crisis in faith: The problem of believing in God if there is so much unnecessary pain and suffering (also known as the “problem of evil”) • LOSS: The great theme in Night is that of loss in terms of the physical, familial, mental, and spiritual