Students Should Be Taught In Eliezer Wiesel's Night

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” -- George Santayana. The Holocaust was one of the most tragic events in human history, with the mass killings of about six million Jews during World War II. To help prevent an event like this from happening again, schools and educational centers have started teaching people about the Holocaust to not only learn from our mistakes and grow from them, but to honor the millions and millions of Jews lost and affected by the Holocaust. Night is an autobiography written by a Holocaust survivor named Eliezer Wiesel and is taught in many schools worldwide to help remind students of the events and teach them why and how it happened. But because of the very dark and grim nature of the subject, people have debated whether or not Night should be taught in eighth-grade when students are not yet mature enough to handle the serious material inside the book.

To begin, during the very first segment of the book we hear of a character named Moshie the Beadle. Since Moshie the Beadle was a foreigner, he was deported and loaded onto a train filled with hundreds of other Jews and taken away over the Hungarian border and far into the Galician Forest. Then he and hundreds of others were subjected to horrendous means of execution just for their race. In the book Night it states, “Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns.” (Wiesel 6). The quote states how the Germans had forced the Jews to dig their own graves and be shot into them. They showed no mercy and did so without a second thought. Babies were murdered as means for the entertainment of the Nazi’s, with no regard for anyone but