Night

In Chapter 5, Eliezer describes his rebellion against God during the celebration of the Jewish New Year at Buna. Thousands of Jews gather in the camp’s assembly place, surrounded by barbed wire, prostrating themselves and praising the Name of the Eternal in chanted prayer. Eliezer refuses to do so, repelled by the idea of worshipping a God that allows crematories to be built that murder thousands of faithful men, women and children. Reflecting on his former religious devotion, Eliezer finds he is no longer capable of pleading for forgiveness for his sins by supplicating himself to an absent deity. Though reduced to ashes himself, he feels stronger than God, paradoxically finding greater strength in his ability to survive alone in a world without God, love, or mercy, than in the illusion that a benevolent and merciful deity will eventually save the Jews. Eliezer’s anger and contempt for God’s silence stiffens his resolve and enables him to endure life at Buna, even as he feels a great void gnawing at his heart. This marks a subtle but significant transformation in Eliezer’s character: the discovery of his own personal truth, the value of which Moché had taught him years before.

At the same time, Eliezer recognizes the importance of keeping one’s religious faith in order to survive the brutal conditions of the camp. Loss of faith means losing one’s reason to struggle, and once the will to live fades, death quickly follows. Akiba Drumer, who used to tell his fellow prisoners that God was testing them, and who studied the Cabbala to discover when the day of liberation would come, becomes a victim of the selection once he feels that God has abandoned the Jews. Religious faith and loving concern for one’s family are the main motivations to survive within the concentration camp. Eliezer and his father each live for one another, and while Eliezer no longer believes in a just and merciful God, his angry rebellion functions as a sort of negative faith that energizes his survival. Significantly, Eliezer finds himself returning to God, in spite of himself, when he admires Rabbi Eliahou’s painstaking search for his son. Struck by the aged father’s loyalty, he prays that God will grant him the strength never to abandon his own father or see him as an obstacle to his own survival. The rabbi symbolizes unwavering loyalty and love, the essential values and conditions of human survival in the extremely harsh environment of the concentration camp.

Several incidents in Chapter 5 emphasize the anxiety and terror afflicting the inmates. The selection terrifies the prisoners; Eliezer likens it to The Last Judgment in the Judeo-Christian tradition, when the souls of the righteous and the condemned will appear before God and be sent to heaven and hell, respectively. Ironically, the SS doctors play the role of God as judge in this scene. Eliezer’s father, who fails in the first round, gives Eliezer a knife and spoon before being called back for the second selection, afraid he will be sent to the death chamber. Eliezer notes the irony of the simple “inheritance,” as he calls it, with which his desperate father entrusts him in this poignant passage.

Similarly, Eliezer fears he has lost his leg after his operation in the camp infirmary but is reassured by the doctor that he will be fine within two weeks. Life in the infirmary seems preferable to the work camp, yet a nearby, dying patient, whom Eliezer cannot see but only hear, tells him that danger lurks there and he should try to get out as soon as possible. Selections occur more frequently in the infirmary, the “faceless shape” tells him. Eliezer does not know whether to trust the patient and is skeptical about the invalid’s motivation in telling him this.

Two days later, the prisoners are told that the camp is to be evacuated immediately, before the Russian Army arrives. Eliezer and his father face an unusual dilemma: for once, they are able to decide their own fate. Not knowing whether it is better to stay in the hospital or leave with the rest, they opt for the latter, even though Eliezer’s foot is not healed. As it turns out, Eliezer briefly notes, those who remained in the infirmary were liberated two days later by the Russians. He and his father had the opportunity to stay behind, yet made the wrong choice, one that leads to immense suffering and the death of the Eliezer’s father. The terrible implication of their decision is underscored by Eliezer’s understated and ironical tone in these sentences.

The episode of the march from Buna to Gleiwitz in Chapter 6 is written with sustained emotional power and poignancy. The prisoners are forced to the limits of human endurance, physically and psychologically, during a grueling run of over forty miles in the snow. During the ordeal, Eliezer experiences his body and mind becoming disconnected. Utterly exhausted, the prisoners drive themselves mechanically onward, like a herd of animals or a single body operating automatically by instinct. The process of their dehumanization by the Nazis reaches its peak in the passage; unable to think, they are motivated solely by fear and the threat of being trampled by the mass of moving bodies around them. In this almost unconscious collective state, they summon an extraordinary energy that enables them to transcend hunger, the cold, malnourishment and fatigue. The individuality of the exhausted men merges into a mob that is collectively propelled forward by what Wiesel calls a “blind destiny,” a sort of ecstasy that carries them onward with animal energy. This moment of physical and spiritual transcendence testifies to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of almost inconceivably trying circumstances.

This out-of-body experience fades, however, once morning comes. The exhausted prisoners sink to sleep in the snow and, in many cases, die. As Eliezer looks around him, he sees a world of death. The extreme limit of the human capacity to survive has been reached, and death silently claims one after another as naturally as closing one’s eyes. In every dead corpse, Eliezer sees himself.

Pulling themselves away from this head-reeling spectacle to rest in a shed and watch over each other, Eliezer and his father each experience a moral awakening. Unable to sleep, Eliezer realizes that to sleep means to die, and something in him revolts against the thought of a death like this. His father, after briefly dozing, struggles back to consciousness with a start and then smiles. Eliezer is unsure from which world the smile came: the dream world or the real world of the death surrounding them. Perhaps his father has realized they are equally unreal; at any rate, Eliezer suggests his father, too, has had a significant moment of insight.

Juliek’s beautiful violin concert to the dead and dying in the dark barracks at Gleiwitz is another moment of awakening for Eliezer. So unexpected and out of place, Eliezer first thinks he must be hallucinating when he hears the plaintive sound arise out of silence. Juliek plays a fragment of the Beethoven violin concerto with such beauty and purity of tone that it seems the young violinist’s entire life is compressed into his notes—his dreams, his lost hopes, and his extinguished future. This swansong is an outpouring of Juliek’s soul, expressing his full humanity, which has been crushed and condemned to death by Nazi brutality.