night study guide

thank you sparknotes for the descriptions of the characters 🙏🙏 REMEMBER TO REVIEW THE CHAPTERS EAD SUMMARIES PREPARE

what did the Jews of Sighet lose when Germany took over and how did elies father react ??

what did the Jews of Sighet lose when Germany took over and how did elies father react ??

• valuables

• jewish leaders were arrested

• all forced to wear yellow stars

• confined to small ghettos

• elies father thot it wasn’t that bad and not all was bleak

• “the yellow star isn’t lethal” (or smth like that)

why does elies not celebrate yom kippur

• father told him not to

• shows how he’s losing faith in his religion

• his act of rebellion against god for putting them thru this

“My father did not consider it so grim... ‘The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal...”

• shows how elies father was kind of in denial abt the whole situation and how he was trying to stay optimistic

• didn’t realize the severity of what was abt to happen

“The Germans were already n our town, The Fascists were already in power, the verdict was already out - and the Jews of Sighet were still smiling” (10).

• they all thot that the politeness of the soldier in the kahn’s house meant that the war was coming to the end and they were excited abt that

• they were holding on to that last hope that everything would be ok

“Men to the left! Women to the right” (29)!

ellie and his sisters and mother were separated here and never saw each other again

“Then, for no apparent reason, he let out a terrible scream, a death rattle such as I had never heard before and, with open mouth, thrust his head toward the still steaming liquid” (59-60).

the man sacrificed himself for a ration or two of soup which ended up killing him

he dared to be the one to get to the cauldron of soup and crawled and crawled but didn’t succeed

“As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him” (69).

his act of rebellion not fasting during Yom Kippur

shows how elie started to lose faith and was angry at god for putting him and his people thru this

elie

• narrator

• traces Eliezer’s psychological journey, as the Holocaust robs him of his faith in God and exposes him to the deepest inhumanity of which man is capable

• Despite many tests of his humanity, however, Eliezer maintains his devotion to his father. It is important to note that we learn Eliezer’s last name only in passing, and that it is never repeated.

• His story—which parallels Wiesel’s own biography—is intensely personal, but it is also representative of the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Jewish teenagers

elies father ( shlomo)

Shlomo is respected by the entire Jewish community of Sighet, and by his son as well. He and Eliezer desperately try to remain together throughout their concentration camp ordeal

Moishe the beatle

Eliezer’s teacher of Jewish mysticism, Moishe is a poor Jew who lives in Sighet. He is deported before the rest of the Sighet Jews but escapes and returns to tell the town what the Nazis are doing to the Jews. Tragically, the community takes Moishe for a lunatic

Mrs. Schachter

• deported in the same cattle car as Eliezer

• taken as a madwoman when bc she screams she sees fires every night

• ppl beat her and bind her to get her to stop but she usually doesn’t

• lost most of her family and only has one of her sons with her

• She proves to be a prophetess, however, as the trains soon arrive at the crematoria of Auschwitz.

Dr. Mengele

• Mengele was the cruel doctor who did the selection of arrivals at Auschwitz/Birkenau

• Known as the “Angel of Death,” Mengele’s words sentenced countless prisoners to death in the gas chambers

• He also directed horrific experiments on human subjects at the camp.

Rabbi Eliahou

A devout Jewish prisoner whose son abandons him in one of many instances in Night of a son behaving cruelly toward his father. Eliezer prays that he will never behave as Rabbi Eliahou’s son behaves.

Idek

Eliezer’s Kapo (a prisoner conscripted by the Nazis to police other prisoners) at the electrical equipment warehouse in Buna. Despite the fact that they also faced the cruelty of the Nazis, many Kapos were as cruel to the prisoners as the Germans. During moments of insane rage, Idek beats Eliezer.

the young pipel

one of the many hanged at the camp

• was too light to be killed quickly so he hung in the air suffering for a while

• it was a horrible thing to see

• symbolized the death of god for elie bc god couldn’t be alive if he let this happen

tibi and Yossi

• Czech brothers who become close to Elie in Buna

• parents were killed in Birkenau

• Zionists

• make a plan to move to Palestine after the war with elie

Juliek

• musician in the Buna band where elie meets him

• dies on the way to Buchenwald at the barracks of Gleiwitz

• plays his violin as he dies laying in the pile of bodies to make dying more enjoyable for everyone else

  • played Beethoven which is a German composer so Jewish ppl weren’t allowed to play it

  • an act of resistance

Stein

• Elie’s relative

• asks for sign of his family

• Elie lies and says that they are doing fine

• repays them for this fabricated news by getting them a half ration of bread

  • was able to keep his humanity because of this “news”

French woman

• worked next to Elie in the warehouse

• after Elie gets beat by Idek, she offers him a crust of bread and comforts him

• years later he runs into her at a metro in Paris and talks to her

  • She was a laborer at the warehouse but was not a prisoner of the concentration camp

  • she was Jewish but was passing as aryan with fake papers and blonde hair and only speaking French

Akiba Drummer

• is selected for death bc he was very weak

• asks the others to say Kaddish three days after his death

  • they all forgot to do his dying wish

“How he had aged since last night! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into himself. His eyes were glazed over, his lips parched, decayed. Everything about him expressed total exhaustion. His voice was damp from tears and snow” (88).

• after Elie and all of the other ppl at the camps had to run to evacuate

  • that’s why he is described as seeming miserable

• shows how much physical pain the holocaust caused and the cruelty of the camps and SS officers

“I woke from my apathy only when two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hands, crying: ‘Father! Father! Wake up. They’re going to Throw you outside…’” (99)

• him saying he’s apathetic shows how throwing out the dead was expected at this point and normalized which is horrible

• only started to care when it was his father

• tried to wake him up when he wasn’t even sure if father was alive himself

• shows how important his father is to Elie and how desperate he was for him to survive and stay with him

I could have screamed in anger. To have lived and endured so much; was I going to let my father die now? Now that we would be able to take a good hot shower and lie down” (105)?

• he was mad at his father for wanting to rest more bc if they did they would die

• he’s convincing his father to keep going and not succumb to death

• he’s mad that he wants to rest when they could take a shower for the first time in ages

“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (115).

• Elie

• shows how a part of him died in the camps

• he was dead on the inside and that reflected through his emmaciated and malnourished looks

• there’s more but it’s like self explanitory yk?? you guys got this :) !! <3

significance of anecdotes in ch 4

There is a reason that all of chapters 4 and 5 are a series of anecdotes is that it shows what daily life was like. Elie’s time in the camp wasn’t just the big events that happened in the war and how it affected him, but also the smaller events that still left an impact on the camp that affect individuals directly. It shows how eventful, harsh, and cruel daily life in the camp was. The anecdotes demonstrate how the horrors of the camps weren’t just on a massive level with many people dying and getting hurt in statistics, but also on personal or individual levels with events in individuals lives caused by the camps. For example, when Elie didn’t fast for Yom Kippur, it showed his loss of faith which was caused by the camp but isn’t reflected in statistics or widely considered as a big loss from the Holocaust. Just because something cruel happened during the Holocaust but isn’t shown in mass statistics or widely known doesn’t mean it didn’t affect many individuals on a personal level. In conclusion, the anecdotes showed the smaller things in life that had a big impact caused by the concentration camps and the Holocaust overall.

UNDERSTAND HIS NOBEL PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

• informs audience of atrocities of Holocaust

• tells them to not respond in silence

• “silence never help the victim of a situation it only helps the oppressor” (again not an exact quote but you get the deal)

• indifference is more dangerous than hatred

pathos

evokes emotion

ethos

gives credibility to speaker

logos

uses statistics and facts

persuasive techniques

• pronouns (I, you, we) includes audience more and pulls them in

• questions to get audience using their thinking caps

• personal anecdotes to prove a point

• address and disprove opposing argument

• exaggerating to get point across

• figurative language

• reppetition

• listing relevant things (usually in threes)

• imagrey