Night

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1956

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-9

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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary

Upon arriving at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz, the SS immediately segregate the deportees by gender. It is a chaotic scene, and Eliezer and his father are separated from Eliezer’s mother and sisters, not realizing they will never see each other again. Clinging to his father’s arm amid the commotion, Eliezer notices an old man behind them fall to the ground, shot by an SS soldier. A prisoner asks Eliezer and his father how old they are, and angrily tells them they need to claim they are 18 and 40 years old, respectively, when questioned by the camp officials. Another prisoner violently accosts the newly-arrived deportees, telling them they have arrived at Auschwitz to be burned in the crematory.

The male deportees are marched to a square where the notorious SS doctor, Josef Mengele, selects those he considers healthy enough to be interred in the camp and those who are to be killed immediately. Eliezer is relieved when he and his father are assigned to the same group, although they don’t know if they’re bound for the prison or the crematory. The road before them leads to large, flaming pits, and a truck delivers a load of children’s bodies to be dumped into a burning ditch. Horrified, Eliezer believes he must surely awaken from this nightmare, but the sound of his father’s voice draws him back to reality: “I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it. […] ‘Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed,’” his father replies (42).

As the deportees begin to weep and recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, a surge of anger against God swells up within Eliezer. Marching closer to the ditch, Eliezer resolves to break free and throw himself on the barbed wire, preferring to die from a Nazi bullet than be burned alive. In spite of himself, he finds the words of the Kaddish forming on his lips as he prepares for death. Two steps from the pit, however, the deportees are ordered to turn toward a barracks. The unspeakable horror of the scene is indelibly burned into Eliezer’s mind:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed […] Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust (43-44).

As they enter the barracks, dozens of resident prisoners order the deportees to strip, beating them randomly with truncheons. To Eliezer, it is like a scene from Hell. The prisoners, themselves Jews, are wantonly violent and crazed as they assault the new arrivals. The SS pick out the strongest-looking men to work in the crematories; the rest are sent to the barbers, where all the hair is shaved off their bodies. Dispirited and surrounded by the bitter sobbing of his fellow deportees, Eliezer is overcome “by an inhuman weariness” (45). The deportees are psychologically, as well as physically, reduced to an almost animal-like condition:

Those absent no longer touched even the surface of our memories. We still spoke of them […] but we had little concern for their fate. We were incapable of thinking of anything at all. Our senses were blunted; everything was blurred as in a fog […] The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. (45)

Early in the morning, the Kapos (Jewish prisoners in charge of the barracks) force the deportees to shower and dress in grotesquely ill-fitting prison clothes. Their transformation is complete: “within a few seconds, we had ceased to be men” (46). Eliezer notices how changed his father appears and that he, himself, has become a completely different person; his former self, the devout student of the Talmud, has been consumed by the flames of Auschwitz.

Eliezer and the other male deportees are forced into a new barracks, where some collapse onto the mud floor, exhausted. The Kapos force anyone who has new shoes to surrender them. Eliezer’s shoes, coated in mud, escape notice, and he sarcastically offers a prayer to God, thanking him “for having created mud in His infinite and wonderful universe” (47). An SS officer addresses the prisoners, warning them that if they don’t work, they will be burned in the crematory. Unskilled workers, including Eliezer and his father, are sent to a barracks reserved for laborers and run by a gypsy deportee.

In this new barracks, the viciously violent treatment continues. Eliezer’s father politely asks to use the lavatory and is savagely struck by the gypsy. Eliezer is shocked that he does not come to his father’s defense, and he resolves, in silent remorse, to never forgive his captors for this act of brutality.

That afternoon, the new prisoners are marched outside of Birkenau, the reception center for the larger camp, to Auschwitz. Eliezer notices the inscription written over the iron door to the camp, which reads, Work Is Liberty! His first impression is that this facility is better than Birkenau; little gardens are interspersed among the two-story concrete buildings. After the compulsory shower, the prisoners are forced to run to a new barracks, overseen by a Pole. He addresses the new inmates benevolently and encourages them to keep their faith and help each other in order to survive. This is a welcome change; the resident prisoners treat the newcomers without brutality and they are given coffee and soup. That afternoon the “veteran” prisoners tattoo a number on the arm of each newcomer.

A week later, a bespectacled, weary little man approaches Eliezer and his father. He identifies himself as Stein, the husband of Eliezer’s cousin, and asks if they have heard any news about his wife and sons, whom he left behind in Antwerp when he was deported. Eliezer lies, telling him that he heard they are doing well. A few weeks later, Stein is excited to hear that a new transport is arriving at Auschwitz from Antwerp, from which he hopes to get more good news about his family. Eliezer and his father never see Stein again. He had received news, real news this time, and lost his will to live.

As life continues for the survivors in Eliezer’s quarters, some discuss the mysterious ways of God and the test to which He is putting the Jews, exhorting the others not to despair. Eliezer is no longer interested in theological debates; he has ceased praying. Though he doesn’t deny God’s existence, he doubts God’s justice. Eliezer and his father try to encourage each other by pretending to believe that his sisters and mother are still alive in another camp. Part of the last group of ordinary laborers in their barracks, they are sent to a new camp, Buna.

Chapter 4 Summary

The head of the Buna camp has a kind face and offers food to several young boys in the group. Eliezer later learns that he has an ulterior motive; children are trafficked among homosexuals in the camps. At Buna, the deportees are quarantined for three days and subjected to a medical examination. The names of prisoners who have gold teeth are recorded; Eliezer himself has a golden crown that could serve as precious currency in the future. Eliezer and his father are assigned to a work in an electrical-equipment warehouse, along with some Jewish musicians, Polish civilians, and French women. Eliezer befriends two Czech brothers whose parents had been killed at Birkenau, with whom he often sings Hebrew chants and discusses Palestine. He regretfully notes that their parents, like his, lacked the courage to emigrate to safety while it was still possible. The boys agree to take the first boat to Haifa, a port city in Palestine, if they live to see the liberation of Europe from the Nazi regime. Eliezer is pleased that a kind German Jew oversees his quarters, one who is devoted to the well-being of the young and weak in the group.

One day, Eliezer is summoned to the dentist’s office to have his gold crown removed. The dentist, a Czech Jew, has a face “like a death mask” (59), but gives Eliezer a reprieve when he claims he doesn’t feel well. A week later, Eliezer returns with the same excuse and is again dismissed. A few days later, the office is closed and the dentist is thrown in prison to be hanged for trafficking in the prisoners’ gold teeth. Eliezer has no pity for him; he is now almost beyond feeling anything other than the animal sensations of hunger, warmth, and exhaustion: “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (59).

Another incident underscores the random brutality interspersed with an occasional gesture of kindness that marks prisoner life in the camp. After Eliezer is savagely beaten without cause by Idek, the Kapo of the warehouse, a young French girl with whom he works but has never conversed comforts him and gives him a piece of bread. Looking silently into his eyes for a long time, she finally speaks words of encouragement to Eliezer in German. Years later, he sees her in the Paris Metro and introduces himself. He learns that she is Jewish but managed to pass herself off as Aryan when she was deported from France to the labor camp. No one in the camp knew she could speak German; she took a serious risk doing so when she came to Eliezer’s aid.

On another occasion, Eliezer’s father is brutally beaten with an iron bar by the same Kapo. Eliezer watches silently, without moving, angry not at the Kapo but at his father for not knowing how to avoid the beating. The Polish foreman at the warehouse, who originally seems sympathetic and intelligent, also beats Eliezer’s father, in order to force Eliezer to give him his golden crown. After two weeks of this treatment, Eliezer gives in. Shortly afterward, Eliezer finds the Kapo having sex with a young Polish girl in the barracks after the prisoners are taken from their quarters. Discovered when he bursts out laughing at this improbable ruse, Eliezer is later whipped unconscious as punishment. Together, these seemingly random vignettes form a coherent picture of the brutal, dehumanizing conditions Eliezer and the other prisoners endure at the labor camp.

During an air raid by American bombers shortly afterward, the SS guards take refuge in the camp’s shelters, leaving two cauldrons of soup unattended outside the kitchen. Though sorely tempted, the prisoners are afraid to risk being shot by their captors if they try to sneak some to eat. Suddenly, a door opens and a man crawls worm-like toward the cauldrons. Eliezer recalls the prisoners viewing this spectacle with envy: “Hundreds of men crawled with him, scraping their knees with his on the gravel. Every heart trembled, but with envy above all. This man had dared” (66). As he reaches the first cauldron with great effort, hoisting himself up to look inside, he is shot dead. Within moments, the American bombers begin to drop their munitions on the camp, and the prisoners exult vengefully: “Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life” (67). A few buildings are destroyed in the bombardment but there are no casualties, other than the single prisoner who committed suicide for a ration of soup.

A week later, a gallows is erected in the assembly area of the camp for the execution of a young Polish prisoner who stole something during the air raid. The other prisoners are forced to watch the execution, performed by the Kapo and two prisoners who aid him in exchange for plates of soup. Eliezer recalls that his soup tasted excellent that evening. Chapter 4 concludes with an account of another hanging, this time of a young pipel, “a child with a refined and beautiful face,” who was the favorite of a Dutch Kapo involved in sabotaging the electric power station at Buna. The boy mounts the gallows alongside two adults, as the prisoners watch. While the adults quickly die, the pipel is so lightweight that the fall does not break his neck, and he slowly twists, struggling between life and death for more than half an hour, as the prisoners look on, weeping. The horror and poignancy of this execution wrests the last remnants of human sympathy from the weary, inured inmates. Eliezer notes that the soup that night tasted “of corpses” (71).

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

In these chapters, Eliezer experiences the unvarnished horror of Nazi brutality toward the Jews and its dehumanizing effects. The symbolic meaning of the book’s title becomes clear as the deported Jews are thrust ever deeper into a hellish nightmare, a literal, metaphorical, and spiritual night. It is a dark night of the soul, an eclipsing of human identity and feeling, a return to the savagery of inhuman cruelty and animal existence.

Physical night becomes a symbol of this transformation. Confined to their ghettoes, the Jews learn at night that they are to be deported from Sighet starting the next morning. Madame Schachter’s hallucinatory screaming during the night on the train to Auschwitz signifies the dark, horrific fate toward which they are hurtling, a fate which cannot be borne sanely. The unspeakable horror of babies being thrown into burning pits in the midnight gloom, as the deported Jews are marched toward what they assume will be their death, plunges Eliezer into a night from which he will never emerge:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed […] Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live (43).

The emotional intensity of this passage, reinforced by its verbal repetitions, powerfully conveys the abrupt, unalterable transformation of consciousness Eliezer experiences during his first night at Birkenau. The narrative’s themes of night and silence are wedded in Eliezer’s testimonial to the murdered children; a silent, murdered God that does not intervene to save his people; and the murdered dreams of the 15-year old narrator.

Wiesel also describes the Nazis’ systematic psychological terrorism of the Jews in these chapters. This terrorism has two purposes: it prevents the Jews from rebelling, and it conditions them to accept being dehumanized without active resistance. The psychological terrorism of the Jews involves several stages. The Nazis first separate the deportees by sex, severing family ties and creating anxious confusion among mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and grandparents. Next, they demonstrate their absolute control over the deportees’ fate by marching them past the fiery crematoria. Some deportees are executed on the spot. The Jews are then stripped of their individuality, being forced to shower together and put on ill-fitting prison uniforms. Finally, they are tattooed with identification numbers, symbolizing their complete reduction to sub-human status and the erasure of their individual personal identities. Throughout the process, they are physically beaten, threatened, and abused by the Nazi guards.

The Jews’ response to this brutal dehumanization is complex. To survive the abuse psychologically, they must become emotionally numb, which further dehumanizes them. Eliezer is fascinated, shocked, and at times ashamed at this reaction. Subjected to the constant humiliation and brutality of concentration camp life, he becomes little more than a body. Human existence, in all its richness and complexity, contracts to the base level of a digestive organ, with the only awareness of life the simple pangs of hunger. There is no longer room for thought, for the human and social emotions of love, sympathy, and ethical action. Wiesel’s language emphasizes the reduction of human identity to the animal function of eating, in order to survive.

Yet, at the same time, Wiesel’s narrative demonstrates that survival is impossible without hope, or the illusions offered by hope. The Jewish elders counsel the younger not to despair and instead to maintain their faith that they will be liberated. The possibility that his wife and children survive sustains Eliezer’s cousin Stein, until he finally learns the truth and loses his will to endure the conditions of life in the concentration camp. Similarly, Eliezer and his father try to encourage each other with reassurances that their loved ones must surely be alive. Even Eliezer, whose faith in a benevolent and just God has been shattered, consoles himself, singing hymns “evoking the calm waters of Jordan and the majestic sanctity of Jerusalem” with Yossi and Tibi, the two Czech brothers in his group at Buna (58). Human feeling has not yet been fully extinguished, despite the Nazis’ barbaric treatment of the prisoners, and clinging to those feelings in the midst of brutally-dehumanizing conditions sustains their will to live.

In Chapter 4, however, Wiesel recounts, through a series of powerful vignettes, how the fundamental qualities of human empathy and sympathy are systematically extinguished by the Nazis. Steadily accumulating in emotional intensity, the narrative describes daily life at Buna, interweaving mundane occurrences, brief moments of human kindness, and the outrages and atrocities that Eliezer witnesses at the camp. The narrative style of the chapter is episodic, a collection of seemingly random events, yet its fragmented form faithfully represents how Wiesel actually experienced life at the camp. The monotony of daily life is unremarkable, until punctuated by memorable incidents of violence or cruelty—of new types of outrage or notable examples of the absurdity of existence the prisoners experience.

In this chapter, Eliezer describes the pecking order among the inmates, in which those in power exploit the weaker. He also describes the underground economy of the concentration camp, in which food, shoes, and gold teeth become exchange currency among the prisoners and their overseers. In these dehumanizing conditions where hunger is a constant, food is bartered for favors and services. Obtaining food for oneself becomes virtually the sole preoccupation of the prisoners, and ethical considerations are willingly sacrificed to secure an extra bit of bread or a plate of soup. Two prisoners assist in the execution of a young Polish inmate for the price of a bowl of soup, while Eliezer is forced to give up his gold crown to prevent his father from being beaten, ultimately getting an extra food ration for it. The poignant episode of the prisoner crawling toward the soup cauldrons during the air raid, sacrificing his life for a mouthful of broth, is one of the most memorable images of the book. It underscores the utter degradation of human life in the camp, the extremes to which the prisoners are driven by hunger and malnourishment, and the resilience of the instinct for survival, which motivates some to undertake such a risk. The pathetic spectacle of the beautiful young boy slowly dying in a noose at the end of the chapter represents for Eliezer the death of God. Emotionally deadened by a steady diet of atrocities and beatings, this execution of the innocent shocks the other prisoners to a renewed sense of profound grief and hopelessness. It epitomizes, in an image of mythological power, the triumph of evil in the concentration camp.