What Does Elie Wiesel Mean By The Word Night?

“How does one mourn for six million people who died? How many candles does one light? How many prayers does one recite? Do we know how to remember the victims, their solitude, their helplessness? They left us without a trace, and now we are their trace” -Elie Wiesel. Wiesel succeeds in demonstrating that the Holocaust and the period of time, which surrounded it “would be judged one day.” He composes his experiences into a heart rending memoir: Night; believing that he needed to be the “bear witness.”

The word “night” means the period of darkness in each twenty-four hours. The use of the metaphor night marks the end of most people’s normal lives. During 1933 all Jews, homosexuals, and Roma (Gypsies) were sent to concentration camps.

The Holocaust was created by Adolf Hitler in 1933 ending in 1945. Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the leader of the Nazi party, chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and the Führer of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. The word Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The term “concentration camp” is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933-1945, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities. While in the camps, many feared selection. Selection is when SS doctors would decide who would be sent to immediate death and who would be sent to work. Usually those who were 14 and older were sent to work but those who were elderly or women with children were sent to gas chambers. Elie felt that someone would need to “bear witness” to the Holocaust and to him, he was that someone. During his time in the concentration camps, Elie witnessed the most unspeakable tragedies. Regardless of this

Wiesel lived in the camps under deplorable, inhumane conditions, gradually starving, and was ultimately freed from Buchenwald in 1945. Elie and his father were separated from his mother and younger sister and taken to Auschwitz. Of his relatives, only he and two of his sisters survived the Holocaust. The people in the concentration camps were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps. The elders in the camps explained to Elie, “‘Back then, Buna was a veritable hell. No water, no blankets, less soup and bread. At night, we slept almost naked and the temperature was thirty below. We were collecting corpses by the hundreds everyday. Work was very hard.’” The elders, the ones who were in the camps longer than others, had faced crucial, worse conditions than the new prisoners. “The old men stayed in the corner, silent, motionless, hunted down creatures. Some were praying.” This evidence indicates that the elders would try to avoid the selection because they well knew that they were next. During selection, the prisoner is presented to the SS doctor and they would judge whether the prisoner is young enough to continue working in the camps. “Our Blockälteste had not been outside a concentration camp since 1933. He had already been through all slaughterhouses, all the factories of death. Eleven million people were killed during