Night :: essays research papers

The Holocaust, was a time period from 1933-1945, in which primarily Jews and other groups were imprisoned and exterminated by Nazi Germany. With the ascendance of Adolf Hitler in 1933, most Jews who did not flee Germany were sent to concentration camps. When World War II started, Hitler declared that all Jews in his conquered nations were to be exterminated. By the end of the war, 6 million Jews had been killed, along with Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and others. Night by Elie Wiesel, starts out in Elie’s hometown of Sighet, Romania. Eliezer is a teenage boy living in the Hungarian town of Sighet, Romania. His father is a well respected in the community. Eliezer is a student of Talmud, Jewish oral law and also Cabbala, Jewish mysticism. Eliezer is also very religious since he is an Orthodox Jew. It is 1941 and Sighet is one of the last untouched Jewish communities left in Europe. The first act of anti-Semitism was the deportation of all foreign Jews, including Eliezer’s teacher, Moshe the Beadle. Moshe soon comes back to warn Sighet, that German officials intercepted the train carrying Jews out of Hungary. The Jews were forced to dig graves and ended up being shot and thrown into them. No one believed him, thinking he was mad, including Eliezer. By the spring of 1944, the fascists take control of the Hungarian government and Hungarian capital, Budapest, yet the people of Sighet ignore this. When the Germans arrive in Sighet, they force all Jews to live in ghettos and wear yellow stars. Eventually all the J ews are put on trains bound for Birkenau, leaving all their possessions and lives behind. Being the last family to leave for Birkenau, Martha, former servant of Elizier’s family offers to hide them in her village, but their foolish optimism rejects her offer. At the first concentration camp Birkenau, Eliezer is separated from his mother and sister, but stays with his father, in which he is very happy about. However they are still uncertain as whether they will be sent to labor camps or cremated. As they moved through Birkenau, they see babies thrown into cremation pits, with a separate pit for adults. Eliezer cannot believe what is happening, and his father cries. After being processed at Birkenau, the prisoners are sent to Auschwitz, where they are tattooed with their prison numbers and stay here for several weeks before being transferred again to Buna.