Night: Week of 3/23/15

Prompt: Describe what has happened so far along with your thoughts on the story.
Pages Read: 0-43

So far in the story, it takes place in 1944, in the village of Sighet, Romania. In which a twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spends much time and emotion on the Talmud and on Jewish mysticism. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, returns from a near-death experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the serenity of their lives. However, even when anti-Semitic measures force the Sighet Jews into supervised ghettos, Elie's family remains calm and compliant. In spring, authorities begin shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Elie's family is part of the final convoy. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can scarcely move and have to survive on minimal food and water. One of the deportees, Madame Schächter, becomes hysterical with visions of flames and furnaces.

At midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group looks in horror at flames rising above huge ovens and gags at the stench of burning flesh. Guards wielding billy clubs force Elie's group through a selection of those fit to work and those who face a grim and improbable future. Elie and his father Chlomo lie about their ages and depart with other hardy men to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. Elie's mother and three sisters disappear into Birkenau, the death camp. After viewing infants being tossed in a burning pit, Elie rebels against God, who remains silent.

After reading about this I was horrified by the events that had happened. When they had mentioned that infants were being tossed in a burning pit, it kind of reminded me of an article someone had that talked about children experiments that had happened during the Holocaust. I didn't really think that this would be true at all. In fact it just shows just horrifying and unbelievable this historical event was. There are many things in this book that the character talks about that I didn't know happen real life. But I guess it just shows that there are a lot of things we still don't know about the subject especially since the topic is so broad.

I commented on: Carlos, Diego, Sarai