Night Summary and Analysis

Chapter 1 Summary

Eliezer, the narrator, is a 12-year-old boy in 1941, living in the Transylvanian town of Sighet (then recently annexed to Hungary, now part of Romania). He is the only son in an Orthodox Jewish family that strictly adheres to Jewish customs and law. He has two elder sisters, Hilda and Béa, and a younger sister called Tzipora. His parents are grocers. His father is respected within his community at Sighet.

Eliezer studies the Talmud and Jewish mystical texts of the Kabbalah, an unusual interest for a teenager. His father Shlomo doesn’t approve of this. Eliezer finds a sensitive and challenging teacher in Moishe the Beadle, a local pauper, who encourages the impressionable boy to perceive God through questions. A while later, the Hungarians expel all foreign Jews, including Moishe. Ellie weeps for the loss of his tutor. The citizens of Sighet accept exile as a natural consequence of war and contend that the deportees are working in Galicia. Months later, Moishe returns to tell the village about the fate of the exiled. After they had arrived in Poland, they were taken to a forest where they were forced to dig their own graves and were systematically gunned to their death. Moishe was hit on the leg, and he had pretended to die, after which he escaped. He weeps as he recounts the horror, but the villagers consider he has lost his mind and do not take his words seriously.

As 1942 and 1943 pass, the people in the village follow the war through London radio news. Elie pleads with his father to sell everything and shift to Palestine but Shlomo resists, saying that he is too old to start afresh.

In the spring of 1944, the Hungarian government falls, and the Fascists take over. The next day, German armies occupy Hungary. The villagers presume that anti-Semitism would be restricted to the capital city of Budapest, but a few days later, German cars appear on Sighet’s streets. Initially, the Germans are polite and charming, but on the seventh day of Passover, the edicts begin and restrictions and oppressive measures are quickly imposed on the Jews—they are prohibited from leaving their residences; they have to hand over their valuables to the Gestapo; they have to wear a yellow star for identification. Eventually, they are only allowed in certain geographic areas and are forced into living in ghettos. However, life returns to “normal” as the Jews set up councils and delude themselves as a means of survival. One day, Shlomo comes back with the news that the family will be deported and will be allowed only one bag per person. They start preparing. The next day, his family is moved from a large ghetto to a small one. Eliezer feels nothing as he leaves the house he grew up in, but his father begins to weep. At this point, Eliezer begins to hate the Nazis, and he calls his hate the only thing that still connects him to them today. Their gentile former servant Martha offers to hide the family in her village, an offer that the Wiesel family tragically declines.

One the night before the deportation, the family eats their dinner together for the last time. When people wake up at dawn, they are foolishly optimistic, regarding the deportation as a sort of a holiday. The Nazis and their Hungarian counterparts herd everyone into cattle cars, which are sealed shut. The Gestapo puts one person in charge of each car and threatens to shoot him if anyone escapes. The last Jews in Sighet are now bound for Auschwitz.

Chapter 1 Analysis

One of the most enduring questions that have haunted the Holocaust survivors is whether they could have escaped the Nazi torture if they would have heeded the warnings. A sense of doom afflicts every line in the first section of Night, through which Wiesel laments the typical human propensity to delude themselves into optimism and not wake up to the facts of the disaster that awaits them. The Jews of Sighet are unwilling to believe what Hitler and his Nazis are capable of doing, despite being systematically robbed of their basic freedom and facilities. Eliezer begs his father to relocate to Palestine but at that moment the idea of relocation is a more exhaustive and disruptive option for his father, who is yet to comprehend that this perhaps could have saved their lives. Again, when the Jews are forced to move into ghettos, they appear to be relieved as they no longer have to deal with overt prejudices and can live in their own space uninhibitedly. These passages can be ironic if they wouldn’t have been so tragic retrospectively. The family chooses not to take up Martha on her offer to escape, choosing rather to believe the authorities. The most poignant reminder of a warning being unheeded is when Moishe returns and recounts his horrific experience. He had come back to the town to alert the Jews of what horrors lay ahead but was dismissed as a madman. This also serves as a cautionary tale that a firsthand report should never be dismissed, thereby underlining Wiesel’s own intention in writing the book—that his personal history too should not be discarded by the world and should serve as a testimony against the horrors of Nazism. If one objective of his recounting is to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself, another is to ensure the preservation of the memory of the victims. In this way, the first section also preserves the memory of the Jewish tradition through Wiesel’s father, who is a respected member of the community and whose “good story” remains unfinished when he is abruptly called away. This incomplete “good story” symbolizes the abrupt end to their peaceful life, the tremendous disruption to the Jewish community, and the subsequent loss of Jewish tradition.

Although his narrative is filled with regret and a little guilt, Wiesel is aware of what prompts this optimism—this, after all, is a survival strategy. The longer humans wouldn’t acknowledge the threat, the longer they can remain in bliss. While in this section the Jews inadvertently participate in their own destruction by remaining persistently passive, in the later chapters they will take on an active and aggressive role and turn on each other to survive. Hence, Night, apart from documenting the horrors of the Holocaust, also is a study into the human mind and what it is capable of when confronted with extreme realities.

In this section, there is an almost obsessive quality to Wiesel’s description of night and day. He describes every single dusk, night, and dawn from the time the Germans invade Sighet to the time he boards the train. This detailed capturing of the days and nights emphasizes the hours the Jews spent waiting, trying to speculate their future. It also successfully portrays the feeling of every day being dragged out and the sense of doom that hangs in the air.

The first section of Night also establishes the background of Eliezer’s faith with which he struggles later. In the beginning, he is a devout Jew who studies Jewish tradition faithfully and believes faithfully in God. As the Jews are deported, they continue to believe that God will save them from the Nazis. However, as the story progresses, the reader sees how the enormity of the torture compels the Jews to confront the question of whether God exists. The horrors of Nazi camps didn’t just result in loss of lives but also the dissolution of man’s faith in God, forever sentenced to live in a spiritual vacuum.