Night by Elie Wiesel - Download as PowerPoint

							STUDY GUIDE
  ANSWERS
• Matching Character Section

• True False Section

• Multiple Choice Section
• Moshe chooses to live in poverty, doing odd
  jobs so that most of his time can be spent
  devoted to religious study.

• Eliezer wants to study Jewish mysticism
  (against his father’s wishes).

• Moshe becomes Eliezer’s respected teacher and
  role model.
• All foreign born Jews are deported, including Moshe.

• Moshe returns and tells the story of mass execution by
  the Nazis.

• Moshe escapes and is a changed man; a man without
  faith or joy.

• He warns the townspeople, but they refuse to believe
  him.

• Even Eliezer doubts him and feels pity on his old
  teacher who people believe has gone mad.
• The war has not yet touched them directly.

• They feel their remote village is insignificant to
  the Nazis.

• The end of the war is in sight, and the Jews of
  Sighet are optimistic that the Russian army will
  liberate them.
• There are two ghettos in Sighet.

• All Jews must live in one and wear a gold star.

• The Jews soon feel a false sense of autonomy in the
  ghettos as they set up councils to handle health
  care, communication with captures, law
  enforcement and sanitation.

• The Jews hope that they will live out the rest of the
  war in this fashion.
• Before the Nazis occupy Sighet, Eliezer urges his father
  to sell his shop and move to Palestine. His father
  refuses; he feels he is too old to start over in a new
  place.

• The Weisels' former servant, Martha, begs the family to
  live with her; the elder Wiesel is too proud to accept.

• Shortly before the evacuation of the ghetto, someone
  knocks on the Wiesels window, but is gone before
  anyone can answer. Eliezer later finds out that the
  police inspector was trying to warn his family to flee.
• The Hungarian police mercilessly beat the Jews
  during the evacuation.

• The Jews are forced to sit or stand long hours in
  sweltering heat without food or drink.

• Jews are packed 80 to a cattle car; they can barely
  breathe, let alone sit or stand.

• The journey takes several days and nights.
  Madame Schachter screams about an all
  consuming fire that is invisible to the rest of the
  passengers.
• The deportees are sympathetic toward
  Madame Schachter when she begins her decent
  into madness, but as her hysteria increases,
  some become less tolerant of her. They beat
  her into submission.
• Madame Schachter’s cries were prophetic.

• Upon arriving at Auschwitz the deportees are
  shaken by the sight of the black smoke from the
  gigantic chimney.

• They are seeing the crematory, and its purpose
  becomes the central source of horror
  throughout their time in the camps.
• Selection is the process by which it is decided which
  prisoners will live as laborers and which will feed the
  crematory.

• Selections are conducted quickly and dispassionately.

• First, men and women are segregated.

• Groups march toward the infamous Dr. Mengele; he
  questions them about age, health, and occupation.

• The questions are cursory and the decisions are
  random.
• Eliezer and his father lie to save their lives.

• While marching toward Mengele, another prisoner
  asks their ages and corrects their reply; “Eighteen
  and forty” he orders.

• If the two were truthful, they would be too young
  and too old for labor.

• Eliezer quickly lies about his occupation calling
  himself a farmer. A student may be considered
  useless.
• Birkenau is euphemistically described as the
  “reception center” for Auschwitz, the death
  camp where Jews and others are slaughtered
  and burned.

• The prisoners are selected for either labor or
  death at Birkenau.
• Being subjected to one atrocity after another
  takes its toll physically, emotionally, and
  spiritually.

• But, it is the ditch filled with babies that forever
  shakes Eliezer’s steadfast faith in God.

• Eliezer never questions God’s existence, but he
  condemns a God that permits such atrocities.
• Eliezer sees a second ditch and it seems that he is
  being directed toward it.

• Deciding that he wishes to be the master of his
  own fate he quickly plans to break ranks and
  throw himself against the electrified fence.

• He offers a final prayer.

• Two steps before the ditch, the prisoners are
  herded into the barracks instead.
•   The prisoners are quickly stripped of independence and
    individuality and are left naked and vulnerable as their captors
    examine them.

•   Kept awake through the first cold night, broken, sickened, and
    weeping, prisoners are forced to run for what seems like an
    eternity the next day.

•   They are dosed with disinfectant, showered and dressed in ill-
    fitting prison garb.

•   Eliezer’s father receives a savage beating for asking to go to the
    bathroom; even Eliezer does nothing to help his father.

•   They are to work and if their work is not satisfactory they will die.
• The prisoners offer total submission to their
  captors.

• They lose the independent will to object to their
  treatment, and they are willing to turn on other
  prisoners to save themselves.

• In using prisoners to maintain order, the Nazis
  are able to easily control large groups of
  people.
• An unidentified prisoner advises Eliezer and his father on
  the ages they must reply to survive the selection.

• Many prisoners cling to hope and humanity through
  religion. They are able to accept the existence of the camps
  by rationalizing that God is testing them.

• Often the prisoners in charge are as brutal as their captors.
  The Polish block leader is an exception; he offers kind words
  and emphasizes that prisoners must not lose their faith or
  abandon each other.

• Eliezer lies to a relative who asks him about his wife and
  children. Eliezer gives the man the last happiness he ever
  knows by saying that he has not heard from them.
• Buna is a labor camp and the two Wiesels are
  selected for labor.

• Upon leaving Auschwitz the prisoners march
  for hours to Buna.

• With so many Germans fighting in the war the
  workforce has been depleted; the workforce is
  supplemented with prisoners, and Eliezer
  works at a warehouse with civilians.
• As the child dies, one of the prisoners asks,
  “Where is God?” At that moment the child,
  who is silently suffering a prolonged,
  agonizing, public death on the gallows,
  symbolizes God to Eliezer.
• Kapos are prison officials in charge of the work
  crews.

• They are characterized as being brutal, sadistic,
  and having enough power to be corrupt.
• The prisoners realize that a single bomb could kill
  hundreds of prisoners, but they welcome the
  bombs joyfully.

• Periodic air raids mean that the war is moving
  closer to the camp, and when the front line reaches
  the camp the surviving prisoners will be liberated.

• One air raid lasts an hour and Eliezer wished it
  would last one hundred hours. Prisoners
  cheerfully clear away the ruins of the raid.
• Upon facing the possible death by Allied
  bombs Eliezer says, “…we were no longer
  afraid of death, at any rate, not of that death.”

• A death that would also bring about the death
  of their captors is not frightening after what
  they endured.
• Eliezer’s anger towards God deepens.

• Eliezer admonished God for tormenting the other
  prisoners’ minds with his continued presence.

• Eliezer accuses God of active responsibility for
  torturing the Jews.

• Eliezer’s rebellion against God leaves a profound
  void in his heart.
• The prisoners run about in preparation for the
  display to get some color in their flesh.

• They run past Mengele to create an illusion of
  strength and to prevent Mengele from being
  able to note their identification numbers.
• Father gives Eliezer his only belongings: a knife
  and a spoon.

• Eliezer’s father believes that this will be his
  final good-bye to his son.

• Eliezer tries to refuse them, but his father
  insists, and Eliezer takes his “inheritance.”
• Eliezer’s foot becomes painfully swollen during the
  January cold.

• The doctor says the he needs an operation. Another
  patient warns him that being hospitalized makes one
  prime target for selection.

• Faced with possible amputation if the foot is not cured,
  he accepts the danger of the hospital.

• The operation is done without anesthetic. He learns
  that his foot will heal, but he must recover for two
  weeks, making him vulnerable to the next selection.
• Two days after the operation, rumors spread that
  the Russian army is on its way to liberate Buna.

• The prisoners learn that they will be marched from
  the camp.

• Eliezer leaves the hospital to find his father.

• They must choose either: Eliezer leaving the
  hospital and joining the father in the march, or his
  father joining Eliezer in the hospital. They choose
  the march believing that the Nazis will surely kill
  any prisoners left behind.
• The realization that his death would leave his
  father alone helps Eliezer summon the strength
  to continue.

• The two Wiesels take turns inspiring each other
  to continue.
• Eliezer prays that he should not do the same to
  his father.

• It is difficult for Eliezer to fight the feelings that
  his own chances for survival would increase
  without his father to support.

• Speaking with the abandoned Rabbi helps
  refocus Eliezer’s commitment to his father.
• As the elder Wiesel is sent to the left with the
  obviously weak, Eliezer creates a confusion that
  allows him to bring his father back to the right.

• Since the Nazis are pressed for time because of the
  approaching Russian army, the selection process
  breaks down.

• Many prisoners are killed in the process, but
  Eliezer and his father survive.
• An elderly man’s son lunges at him for a morsel of
  bread, even as the father tries to share it with him.

• The two incite the other hungry prisoners, and
  after the fight, the father and son are both dead.

• If the bond between father and son is broken, then
  genocide is realized even if the crematory fires are
  extinguished; they no longer need the fires to kill
  them; they are destroying each other.
• Eliezer’s father suffers from dysentery and will
  surely die; the doctors see no point in treating
  him.

• Caregivers are no longer willing to “waste”
  any resources on the dying.
• Eliezer feels intense guilt and blames himself
  for doing nothing when the guard attacks his
  father.

• Eliezer’s father is gone after their phenomenal
  struggle, yet Eliezer cannot cry. Worst of all he
  cannot fight the feeling that he is “…free at
  last.”

• Eliezer cannot save his father, so his feelings of
  guilt are irrational.
• As the front approaches the surviving Jews are
  ordered to gather in the camp. News spread
  that they will be executed on the spot.

• The camp resistance movement interferes with
  the execution, and instruction is given to ignore
  the order.

• Five days later the resistance movement stages
  a rebellion , freeing the prisoners shortly before
  liberation by the American army.
• The prisoners eat.

• “Our first act as free men was to throw
  ourselves onto the provisions. We thought
  only of that. Not of revenge, not of our
  families. Nothing but bread.”
• After surviving the selection, the abuse, and
  the starvation of the camps, Eliezer nearly dies
  of food poisoning after liberation.

• Ironically, the very sustenance he needs to
  survive almost kills him when he finally gets it.
• Eliezer has not looked at himself in the mirror
  since deportation from the ghettos.

• When he finally regains enough strength to
  look at himself in a mirror, he says he sees a
  corpse.

• Physically he is alive, but Eliezer’s spirit has
  died.