Night Journals 1 6

Braden Townsend
January 23, 2015
Night Journal #1 Page 18- “Besides, people were interested in everything—in strategy, in diplomacy, in politics, in Zionism—but not in their own fate.” I believe that what he means by this is, that people think that just because they’re so small, or that they’re race is spread out over many countries, that people will think that they will not be noticed and left alone. However this mindset got them killed. The Nazi’s didn’t care about how hard it would be to exterminate the people, they just found a way.

Braden Townsend
January 25, 2015
Night Journal 2
Page 42- “My forehead was bathed in cold sweat. But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn in our age that humanity would never tolerate it….” What I believe he means by this is that he believes the humanity in the Germans would prevent them from actually burning someone alive. However the Germans believed that they’re actually the master race and that everyone else was worthless. Hitler and his Nazi party had taken complete control over the minds of most of the German population, corrupting them horribly and very close to completely.

Braden Townsend
January 25, 2015
Night Journal 3
Page 72- ““Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is he? Here He is---He is hanging here on this gallows…” This passage occurs at the end of the fourth section, as Eliezer witnesses the agonizingly slow death of the Dutch Oberkapo’s pipel, a young boy hanged for collaborating against the Nazis. This horrible moment signifies the low point of Eliezer’s faith in God. The death of the child also symbolizes the death of Eliezer’s own childhood and innocence. The suffering Eliezer sees and experiences during the Holocaust transforms his entire worldview. Before the war, he cannot imagine questioning his God. When asked by Moshe the Beadle why he prays, Eliezer replies, “Why did I pray? What a strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” Observance and belief were unquestioned parts of his core sense of identity, so once his faith is irreparably shaken, he becomes a completely different person. Among other things, Night is a perverse coming-of-age story, in which Eliezer’s innocence is cruelly stripped from him.

Braden Townsend
January 25, 2015
Night Journal 4
Page 76- “To fast would mean a surer, swifter death. We fasted here the whole year round. The whole year was Yon Kippur. But others said we should fast simply because it was dangerous to do so. We should show God that even here, in this enclosed hell, we were capable of singing his praises. In Jewish tradition, the High Holidays are the time of divine judgment. According to the prayer book, Jews pass before God on Rosh Hashanah like sheep before the shepherd, and God determines who will live and who will die in the coming year. In the concentration camps, Eliezer hints, a horrible reversal has taken place. Soon after Rosh Hashanah, the SS (Nazi police) performs a selection on the prisoners at Buna. All the prisoners pass before Dr. Mengele, the notoriously cruel Nazi doctor, and he determines who is condemned to death and who can go on living. The parallel is clear and so is the message: the Nazis have placed themselves in God’s role. Eliezer has decided that the Nazis’ actions mean that God is not present in the concentration camps, and thus praying to him is foolish.

Braden Townsend
January 25, 2015
Night Journal 5
Page 93- “We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything—death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.
At last, the morning star appeared in the gray sky. A trail of indeterminate light showed on the horizon. We were exhausted. We were without strength, without illusions.” This passage occurs in the sixth section of the book, toward the end of the prisoners’ horrible run from Buna. It succinctly describes the prisoners’ godless worldview, which holds survival to be the highest principle and all other morality to be meaningless. In Jewish prayer, God is often referred to as “Master of the Universe.” At this point, the prisoners have replaced God in that role; they themselves are the masters of nature and the world. Eliezer’s experiences have instilled in him the despairing sense that he is alone in the world, a “mere number,” responsible only for his own survival.
By omitting a conjunction between “without strength” and “without illusions” in the last sentence, Wiesel makes the relationship between the two concepts ambiguous. It is unclear whether the ideas are complementary (“We were without strength because we were without illusions”) or unrelated (“We were without strength, and also we were without illusions”). Using the former interpretation, the sentence implies that illusion—perhaps the illusion of faith—can give one strength. As we see when he discusses the death of Akiba Drumer, Eliezer acknowledges that faith gives a person a sense of being and a reason to struggle. By this point in his experience, he is deeply cynical about faith; for him, it is a mere illusion, a deluded belief in an omnipotent creator who doesn’t exist. Along similar lines, the phrase “condemned and wandering” references the entire history of Jewish suffering, a history defined by exile and exclusion. Despite his professed lack of faith, Eliezer is approaching his struggle from within the context of Judaism, not from outside it.

Braden Townsend
January 25, 2015
Night Journal 6
Page 119- “One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.” This is the final passage of Night, Eliezer’s final statement about the effect the Holocaust has had on him. As such, it reinforces the book’s deliberately limited perspective. Night does not pretend to be a comprehensive survey of World War II experiences, nor does it try to explore the general experience of Jews in concentration camps. Instead, it focuses on one specific story—Eliezer’s—to give the reader a detailed, personal account of suffering in the Holocaust. From a more traditional perspective, the ending feels incomplete. A historian or biographer would not be satisfied with this conclusion and would want to know what happened afterward—how Eliezer reunited with his family, what he did after the war, and so on. Night deliberately manipulates narrative conventions, ending where it does because it is meant to offer an intimate portrayal of Eliezer’s wartime experiences, particularly of the cruelty and suffering he experiences in the concentration camps. Other material would distract from the intensity of the experience Wiesel is trying to convey.
Eliezer implies that even though he has survived the war physically, he is essentially dead, his soul killed by the suffering he witnessed and endured. Yet, when Eliezer says, “the look in his eyes, as he stared into mine,” he implies a separation between himself and the corpse. His language, too, indicates a fundamental separation between his sense of self and his identity as a Holocaust victim—as if he has become two distinct beings. The corpse-image reminds him how much he has suffered and how much of himself—his faith in God, his innocence, his faith in mankind, his father, his mother, his sister—has been killed in the camps. At the same time, he manages to separate himself from this empty shell. The image of the corpse will always stay with him, but he has found a sense of identity that will endure beyond the Holocaust. As dark as this passage is, its message is partially hopeful. Eliezer survives beyond the horrible suffering he endured by separating himself from it, casting it aside so he can remember, but not continue to feel, the horror.