Page 18 - Knowledge Organiser Yr9 24-25

Knowledge Base: Tutor Reading Night Year 9
1. Why this book?
A non-fiction text: a memoir based on real events. Informing us of some of the atrocities of the Holocaust. This is a text studied by Year 9 in RS. The novel involves Eliezer pondering God's existence and nature in the face of the untold brutality of the Holocaust.
3. Characters
Eliezer
The narrator. His story is intensely personal, but also representative of the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Jewish teenagers.
Shlomo
Eliezer’s father. Respected by the entire Jewish community, and by his son. He and Eliezer desperately try to remain together throughout their ordeal.
Moishe
Eliezer’s teacher of Jewish mysticism. A poor Jew who lives in Sighet. He is deported before the rest of the Sighet Jews but escapes and returns to tell the town what the Nazis are doing to the Jews.
Akiba Drumer
A Jewish Holocaust victim who gradually loses his faith in God as a result of his experiences in the concentration camp.
Madame Schächter
A Jewish woman from Sighet who is deported in the same cattle car as Eliezer. Taken for a madwoman when she screams that she sees furnaces.
2. Plot
• 1944, Eliezer Wiesel and the remaining Jews in Sighet, are herded away to Auschwitz, a concentration camp.
• The conditions on the train to Auschwitz are unbearable.
• Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sister during a “selection.” They
lie about their ages and are sent to the barracks.
• Eliezer avoids having his gold tooth removed. Idek beats Eliezer.
• Eliezer questions his faith and religion in general. His father somehow survives another
selection. Eliezer has surgery on his foot and the camp is evacuated.
• Eliezer and his father arrive at the Gleiwitz Camp. They travel through German towns
for ten days without being fed and are harassed by German citizens. They arrive at
Buchenwald, twelve passengers survive.
• The journey to Buchenwald thoroughly depletes and eventually kills Eliezer’s father,
relieving an ashamed Eliezer.
• On April 10th, right before the Nazis can destroy the remaining Jews, the Americans arrive
and free the prisoners at Buchenwald.
• Eliezer views himself in a mirror for the first time since leaving Sighet and is surprised by
how much his appearance has changed.
Juliek
Tibi and Yosi
Idek
Franek
Rabbi Eliahou Zalman
Meir Katz Stein
A young musician whom Eliezer meets in Auschwitz.
Two brothers with whom Eliezer becomes friendly in Buna.
Eliezer’s Kapo (a prisoner conscripted by the Nazis to police other prisoners). Eliezer’s foreman at Buna.
A devout Jewish prisoner whose son abandons him.
One of Eliezer’s fellow prisoners.
Eliezer’s father’s friend from Buna. Eliezer’s relative from Antwerp.
Dr. Josef Mengele
Cruel doctor who managed the selection of arrivals at Auschwitz. Known as the “Angel of Death,” he sentenced countless prisoners to death.
4. Context
Concentration camp
A camp in which people are imprisoned or confined, commonly in large groups, without trial.
Kapo
A Nazi concentration camp prisoner who was given privileges in return for supervising prisoner work gangs.
Sighet
Sighet (known today as Sighetu Marmatiei), a town in Transylvania, was part of Romania following World War I. The town was part of Hungary between 1940 and 1944.
Hilda, Béa, Tzipora
Eliezer’s sisters.
5. Themes
Faith in a benevolent God
Eliezer’s struggle with his faith is a dominant conflict in Night. At the beginning, his faith in God is absolute. His belief in an omnipotent, benevolent God is unconditional, and he cannot imagine living without faith in a divine power. But this faith is shaken by his experience during the Holocaust.
Inhumanity
After experiencing such cruelty, Eliezer can no longer make sense of his world. Everything he experiences in the war shows him how horribly people can treat one another—a revelation that troubles him deeply. Eliezer also becomes aware of the cruelty of which he himself is capable.
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