The story of a Holocaust survivor

ELIE WIESEL’S NIGHT

• Raised in the village of Sighet, Hungary

• Jewish faith• Jewish ethnicity• Deported in 1944, to

the Auschwitz concentration camp

• Rescued in 1945 from the Buchenwalk concentration camp

ELIE WIESEL

1928 - ??

CONTEXT OF NIGHT: THE HOLOCAUST

• January: Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany (Jewish population of 556,000)

• March: Concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald are opened

THE BEGINNING: 1933

The Nuremburg Laws:• Defined Judaism as a

race

• Removed Jewish citizenship

• Outlawed intermarrying with “Aryan races”

• Required Jews to carry identification cards

THE NUREMBURG LAWS OF 1935

• March 1938: German troops “peacefully” occupy Austria

• November 1938: Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass

THE MAKINGS OF WAR

• September 1939: Germany invades Poland – WWII starts

• November 1939: Polish Jews required to wear the yellow Star of David

• June 1940: Germany occupies Paris

WORLD WAR II

July 1941: “The Final Solution” begins over the next 4 years 6 million Jews will be murdered

“THE FINAL SOLUTION”

1944 ELIE WIESEL AND HIS FAMILY ARE

DEPORTED TO AUSCHWITZ

1945: DEATH MARCH TO BUCHANWALD

Sighet

AuschwitzBuchenwalk

1945: DEATH MARCH TO BUCHANWALD

Painting by Jan Hartman

ALLIED SOLDIERS LIBERATED ELIE WIESEL ON

APRIL 11, 1945

• Lived in France with his two surviving sisters

• Worked as a French journalist• Would not speak about his Holocaust

experiences for 10 years• Night first appeared in 1956

– much longer and written in Yiddish

• Won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986

AFTER HIS RESCUE

Night is based on Elie Wiesel’s experience but it is not an exact account.

NIGHT

“But if I would show the good that came of it

I must talk of things other than good.”

OR

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”~Dante’s Inferno

WHY?