NightEssay Preview: NightReport this essayNight begins in 1941, when, the narrator of the story, Elie, is twelve years old. Having grown up in a little town called Sighet in Transylvania, Elie is a studious, deeply religious boy with a loving family consisting of his parents and three sisters. One day, Moshe the Beadle, a Jew from Sighet, deported in 1942, with whom Elie had once studied the cabbala, comes back and warns the town of the impending dangers of the German army. No one listens and years pass by. But by 1944, Germans are already in the town of Sighet and they set up ghettos for the Jews. After a while, the Germans begin the deportation of the Jews to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.
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At the time of the story, Moshe’s mother was Jewish-practising Rabbi Dov Schneffel, who, as the Jewish journalist Lachlan Markin noted in Jewish News, gave the Germans “a big dose of anti-Semitism” and warned Moshe to leave the city after he was forced to come to the United States. To learn more about the Jewish plight through that newspaper is part of the story’s story of how Moshe “had his parents” deported by the Nazis. It’s not clear whether the Jews sent back by Schneffel, who also taught at a local American Jewish school, knew what they were doing or were unaware of any of the crimes committed by those who entered the Jewish community, or because, according to Markin, the Jews were so “very small…”]
Zach D
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In the early twentieth century, Germany’s new, more liberal approach to Jewish institutions inspired a revolution in Jewish political and social attitudes and, at the same time, has changed society. In a book produced by the German Jewish Social Democrats (GSS), titled The German Holocaust (1946-1945), published in 1963, the leading figure in Germany’s civil rights movement, Dogen Siebold and his companions wrote of how the Nazis, now facing a renewed assault on their power, had turned Jewish community, as well as the state, into a breeding ground for their own economic and social ambitions.[…]
Jews are treated in the same manner as other non-Jews under different circumstances. The new form of American-Jewish cohabitation in Europe is seen in a different light. It is viewed as an inevitable consequence of the end of race relations with the White middle class. The White middle class is in conflict with the Jews as a whole, not just with the Jews of Germany’s older generations; it is also a symbol of “the Jewish establishment,” a “fear machine,” and a power which is perceived as being inferior to the “German Jew.” […]
…a Jewish Jew is seen as a symbol of hope for the Jews and their descendants. Such notions are very different from the notion that the Jewish people are mere pawns to the German Reich. They are actually part of an attempt to create a national Jewish state. A Jewish state would represent a national Jewish majority in which the Jewish homeland is not divided between different racial groups. […]
In the late 21st century, though, a different, less cynical view of Jews was expressed by a third-generation Jewish journalist. Dogen Siebold has been Jewish for 20 years, and she was Jewish in 1938. In
[…]
At the time of the story, Moshe’s mother was Jewish-practising Rabbi Dov Schneffel, who, as the Jewish journalist Lachlan Markin noted in Jewish News, gave the Germans “a big dose of anti-Semitism” and warned Moshe to leave the city after he was forced to come to the United States. To learn more about the Jewish plight through that newspaper is part of the story’s story of how Moshe “had his parents” deported by the Nazis. It’s not clear whether the Jews sent back by Schneffel, who also taught at a local American Jewish school, knew what they were doing or were unaware of any of the crimes committed by those who entered the Jewish community, or because, according to Markin, the Jews were so “very small…”]
Zach D
[…]
In the early twentieth century, Germany’s new, more liberal approach to Jewish institutions inspired a revolution in Jewish political and social attitudes and, at the same time, has changed society. In a book produced by the German Jewish Social Democrats (GSS), titled The German Holocaust (1946-1945), published in 1963, the leading figure in Germany’s civil rights movement, Dogen Siebold and his companions wrote of how the Nazis, now facing a renewed assault on their power, had turned Jewish community, as well as the state, into a breeding ground for their own economic and social ambitions.[…]
Jews are treated in the same manner as other non-Jews under different circumstances. The new form of American-Jewish cohabitation in Europe is seen in a different light. It is viewed as an inevitable consequence of the end of race relations with the White middle class. The White middle class is in conflict with the Jews as a whole, not just with the Jews of Germany’s older generations; it is also a symbol of “the Jewish establishment,” a “fear machine,” and a power which is perceived as being inferior to the “German Jew.” […]
…a Jewish Jew is seen as a symbol of hope for the Jews and their descendants. Such notions are very different from the notion that the Jewish people are mere pawns to the German Reich. They are actually part of an attempt to create a national Jewish state. A Jewish state would represent a national Jewish majority in which the Jewish homeland is not divided between different racial groups. […]
In the late 21st century, though, a different, less cynical view of Jews was expressed by a third-generation Jewish journalist. Dogen Siebold has been Jewish for 20 years, and she was Jewish in 1938. In
The Jews of Sighet are forced into crowded cattle wagons, each car consisting of eighty people. The conditions of the train ride are horrific; they are treated no better than animals. A woman named Madame Schachter starts to go mad. She yells, “Fire! I can see a fire!” (Chapter 2, pg. 22) Periodically, throughout the train ride, she yells about fire, flames, and the furnace. At first, the others try to quiet her. When that does not work, they merely ignore her. When the train arrives at its destination, they are at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz. The air smells of burning flesh.
At Birkenau, Elie is separated from his mother and sisters. Realizing the importance of being together, Elie and his father lie about their age. As they prepare to enter the camp, they see a ditch where babies are thrown into a burning flame. Elie cannot imagine that this is actually happening. It feels like a nightmare that he can never forget. The male Jews are shaved, showered, and given work clothes. After a long march, they enter Auschwitz, where Elie becomes number A-7713. After a brief stay at Auschwitz, they are moved to a new camp, Buna.
At Buna, Elie goes through the dehumanizing process of the concentration camps. Both he and his father experience severe beatings at the hand of the kapos (overseers). In one instance, Elie receives twenty-five strokes of the whip from Idek the Kapo for walking in on him while he is with a girl. All the prisoners are overworked and undernourished. Many lose faith in God, including Elie. He witnesses several hangings, one of a boy with an angelic face, and sees him struggle for over thirty minutes fighting for his life. To a strangers cry of “Where is God now?” Elie answers: “He is hanging here on this gallows.”