NIGHT

1
NIGHT

• Section 4
• Life in the Camp

2
For Gods sake, where is God?

• WHERE HE IS? THIS IS WHERE- HANGING HERE FROM
  THIS GALLOWS
• The frightening scene that concludes this section
  shows a small childs murder. This young death,
  for Eliezer, symbolizes the murder of his God.

3

• Eliezer comes to believe that a just God must not
  exist in a world where an innocent child can be
  hanged on a gallows.
• Experiencing this murder brings Eliezer to the
  low point of his faith.

4

• The death of the innocent child symbolizes the
  death of Eliezers own innocence. In the camp,
  Eliezer has become someone different from the
  child he was at the beginning of the memoir.

5
EXAMPLES

• 1. He has lost his faith.
• 2. He is also beginning to lose his sense of
  morals and values.
• 3. In a world in which survival is almost
  impossible, Eliezers most important goal is to
  survive for himself.
• 4. He admits that he only lives to feed himself.
• 5. When his father is beaten, he shows no
  sympathy or pity instead he becomes angry at his
  father for failing to learn how to survive
  without attracting the attention of the soldiers.
  

6

• Eliezers loss of innocence is proof of how a
  spiritual, loving, young boy can change under
  such harsh, evil circumstances.

7
FATHER-SON RELATIONSHIP

• Eliezers relationship with his father is
  incredibly important to both of them, because it
  provides them with support.
• However, though it is crucial to Eliezer to
  remain with his father, even this special link
  between father and son becomes strained under the
  stress of the Nazi oppression.

8
EXAMPLES

• 1. Eliezer tells the story about the
  thirteen-year-old boy who beats his father for
  making his bed improperly.
• 2. It is Eliezers great fear that he too will
  lose sense of his kindness and he may turn
  against his father for his own survival.

9
JUMP INTO THE FUTURE

• Eliezers encounter with the French girl who
  quietly comforts him after he is beaten by Idek
  the Kapo is unusual. It is one of the few places
  in the memoir where Wiesel jumps into the future
  to explain what happened after the liberation of
  the concentration camps.

10

• This can be viewed as an extreme coincidence,
• but in Wiesels mind, the fact of surviving
  the Holocaust is in itself an unlikely
  coincidence, a stroke of sheer luck.
• The majority of concentration camp prisoners did
  not survive. If one can survive in the face of
  such great odds, then any coincidence is
  believable, even years later, meeting and
  recognizing a woman who practiced a small act of
  kindness.

11

• Wiesel wants to make the point that his own
  survival is a result of luck and coincidence.
• It was not that he was clever and outwitted, or
  defeated, the Nazis. He simply was not chosen to
  die.