Night: the Holocaust and Wiesel

* His survival of a Nazi concentration camp has shaped his destiny. * It has guided his work as a writer, teacher, and humanitarian activist; influenced his interaction with his Jewish faith; and affected his family and personal choices. * Wiesel spent his childhood days of the 1930s and 1940s studying sacred Jewish texts. * In 1944 during World War II, Wiesel’s life took a profoundly unexpected turn when Germany’s armies invaded Sighet. * Wiesel was freed in April 1945, when he was sixteen years old. * Wiesel settled in the United States in1956. He continued to write about the Holcaust. * Wiesel who married Holocaust survivor Marion Erster Rose in 1969, has worked against oppression and persecution around the world. * In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his activism and courageous works. Introducing the Memoir.

* Night begin in 1941 in Weisel’s Estern European village of Sighet. * By 1944, however, the Germans occupy Sighet and Weisel’s struggle to survive begins. * Through young Wiesel’s eyes, readers travel into the hell of Hitlers death camp and into the darkness of a long night in the history of human race. * Wiesel wrote Night nearly ten years after the end of World War II. * Night is a brief autobiographical work in which the author recounts events he has witnessed and introduces people he has known. * Since Night’s American publication in 1960, Elie Wiesel’s willingness to share his own story has helped turn the tide of world discussion. * After the end of World War II, many people – Jews and non- Jews alike – did not want to think or talk about the horrible events that had occurred. The time and place

* Night takes place in Europe during World War II (1939- 1945). * Germany’s defeat in World War I.
* The Nazi party – In German NAZI stands for National Socialist German Worker Party- cam to power in the late 1920s. Its leader Adolf Hitler. * Many Germans responded enthusiastically to Hitler’s ideas, and in 1933 he became chancellor, or leader, of the country. * In 1938 Hitler began invading the lands around Germany. * Britain and France declared war in 1939.

* The United States did not enter the war until 1941.
* In 1941, when Night begins, Hitler seemed unstoppable. * By 1942 he controlled or was allied with most of Europe. * Hitler’s treatment of the Jews was more than a political strategy.