Resumo de Night - Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel?s Night burns with the all consuming fear and intensity of the Nazi atrocity. The action takes place through the author?s eyes as a twelve year old boy. He is stolen from a life where he praises and loves the God that protects him, and is sent to witness utmost evil in the Death camps; forcefully extinguishing his faith.The stark image of babies being ripped from their mothers, thrown into the air and machine gunned, is the first of a string of unforgettable images. They may stay with us forever- but for the Jewish community of Sziget in Hungary, they are eternal and all encompassing.
The book begins with the description of an ordinary, happy life - yet we wait with dread for it to be ruptured. Into the town floats the mutterings of an old man who has witnessed horrors elsewhere - tragically, nobody believes him. They are completey ignorant to the slaughter of the Jews because of the isolation of their Transylvannian town. Yet we know of the reality of these events - and we can?t do anything about them - and this is frustrating even though they happened sixty years ago. The hopelessness and apparent submission of the people is also frustrating.When the Nazi machine rolls into Sziget they can?t resist.They are taken from their homes and sent marching for miles to a freezing field where they must wait for transport to Auswitch. The tortuous journey is dominated by the image of a screaming woman and her distressed little boy in the dark, cramped train carriage. She screams about fire, yet nobody understands, and they must silence her brutally. Her visions metearialise when they arrive at Auswitch, entering slowly, like a nightmare, into this macabre camp of death. Once out of the train, the men are separated from the women and there is stomach churning tension as they approach the great furnace of burning children, leaving the reader, along with Wiesel, at a loss to how such evil could exist on earth. They escape ?selection? by lying about their age, and he never sees his mother or little sister again, thereon pledging to himself never to leave his father?s side. For the rest of the book this becomes a moral struggle of survival for Elie, as his father?s health wanes and he becomes a burden to his son.
The middle part of the book shifts in tone to something almost hopeful, and again we are waiting for the ?selection? to come round. They are placed in a smaller camp where they work in a factory and get enough bread and soup to survive. Wiesel makes friends and is allowed to regain a sense, however small, of childhood. But he is punished for this when he witnesses his superior with a women, and gets whipped brutally. Soon after this, his innocence, and any faith he had left is smothered completely with the haunting death of a young angelic boy, hung on the gallows before the whole camp. This he equates with the murder of God, and is symbolic of his final submission.
With the war coming to an end they are moved again in to an open train travelling in to Germany and away from the Allied forces. Here they endure extreme weather conditions and hunger, the train stops every day to unload the dead. Human life becomes worthless. Wiesel watches as a scrap of bread is thrown into the carriage and the violent scamble that ensues. Next they are forced to run for days over freezing ground into the heart of Germany; anyone who falls is trampled, anyone who slows is shot. That these hardships are so beyond most of our experience - and thus unreal - yet we know that they actually happened, makes them all the more poignant. When they finally reach their destination and so many have died, one has to wonder why the Nazi?s even bothered with all this when they knew they had lost. The final part of the book takes place in the camp.The father?s ill health is becoming a real burden to everyone and one wonders why he hadn?t been selected before. His life comes to an (appropriately violent) end as he is battered with a riifle butt. Elie doesn?t cry after he has experienced so much death already, and even feels ashamedly relieved. Liberation comes soon after with the resistance striking just as the Nazis, under Hitler?s orders, are about to shoot everyone. After finishing the book we can?t help feeling that he was only allowed to live so he could write this powerfully haunting portrayal.

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