Night :: essays research papers

In 1944, in the village of Sighet, Romania, twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spends much time and emotion on the Talmud and on Judaic mysticism. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, returns from a near-death experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the serenity of their lives. However, even when anti-Semitic measures force the Sighet Jews into supervised ghettos, Elies family remains calm and compliant. In spring, regime begin shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Elies family is part of the final convoy. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can scarcely move and have to survive on stripped-down food and water. One of the deportees, Madame Schchter, becomes hysterical with visions of flames and furnaces.At midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group looks in horror at flames rising above huge ovens and gags at the stench of burning flesh. Guards wielding billy clubs force Elies group through a selection of those fit to work and thos e who face a grim and improbable future. Elie and his founding father Chlomo lie about their ages and depart with other hardy men to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. Elies mother and three sisters disappear into Birkenau, the death camp. After viewing infants existence tossed in a burning pit, Elie rebels against God, who remains silent.Every day, Elie and Chiomo struggle to keep their health so they can remain in the work force. Sadistic guards and trustees involve capricious punishments. After three weeks, Elie and his father are forced to march to Buna, a factory in the Auschwitz complex, where they sort electrical parts in an electronics warehouse. The ferociousness reaches its height when the guards hang a childlike thirteen year old, who dies slowly before Elies eyes.Despairing, Elie grows morose during Rosh Hashanah services. At the next selection, the doctor culls Chlomo from abler men. Chlomo, however, passes a second animal(prenominal) exam and is given another chance to live. Elie undergoes surgery on his foot.Because Russian liberation forces are moving ever closer to the Nazi camp, SS troops discharge Buna in January 1945. The Wiesels and their fellow prisoners are forced to run through a snowy night in bitter cold over a forty-two mile route to Gleiwitz. Elie binds his bleeding foot in strips of blanket. Inmates who falter are shot. Elie prays for strength to save his father from death. At a makeshift barracks, survivors pile together.