The Nazis showed no mercy to men, women, or children. The Jews had been gathered into concentration camps, such as Auschwitz/Birkenau, and either forced into slave labor, or immediately exterminate in gas chambers, by firing squads, and other terrifying means. This meant that many prisoners, including Wiesel, were forced on “death marches” in which they ran between camps in horrible, freezing conditions. In the fall of that year, Allied troops liberated the camps throughout Germany while the Nazis tried to hide evidence of their crimes. This was in addition to Gypsies, LGBTQ people, and others who were considered as threats to the purity of the German bloodline.Īuschwitz, in which Wiesel spent much of his time during the Holocaust, operated through the summer of 1944. When Germany and the rest of the Axis powers were defeated in 1945, it was revealed that six to eleven million European Jews had been murdered. The Jews that were moved into these camps, out of the ghettos, believed that they were being resettled. Camps included Auschwitz/Birkenau, Treblinka, and Belzec. The party developed the “Final Solution,” a plan to exterminate European Jews as quickly and effectively as possible. Hitler was not content with the suppression of a large segment of the population in Germany. The first death camp, Chelmno, was established at the end of 1941. Over the course of a year, 1,500,000 Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, or firing squads. It was in 1941 that the Nazis began to exterminate the Jews. Ghettos were established in Poland, and the yellow stars were implemented as a way of separating the Jewish population from everyone else. A year later, Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. On Kristallnacht, which occurred in November of 1938, Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed and confiscated. They were defined as separate citizens and stripped of their civil rights. The Nuremberg Laws implemented in 1935, as well as others, dehumanized the German Jews and placed restrictions on their lives. Germany fell in line behind Hitler, forming the Nazi party which espoused the view that the Germans were a master race, “Aryan,” and that anyone else would pollute their gene pool and was a threat to the reconstruction of the homeland. He appointed himself Führer of Germany and began to rebuild Germany at the expense of European Jews.Īlthough other cultural groups were also persecuted, it was the Jews of Europe who were faced with the greatest horrors under Hitler’s reign.
While the broader history of Germany is applicable to an understanding of the novel, it’s simpler to start with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and his campaign to blame Jews for the German depression post-WWI. It’s impossible to understand Night without having some broader understanding of the historical context surrounding the novel and everything that happens to the protagonist within it. When speaking about the impact of the novel, critics have often cited its simplicity and minimalism as the main source of its impact. Wiesel, on the other hand, called it his deposition. Due to this fact, and Wiesel’s own altering of events, the book is usually categorized as novel/autobiography, semi-fictional novel, as well as other similar categorizations. It should be noted that through the translations from Yiddish to French and English, the book appears to have lost some of its original anger and truthful horror. It is also considered to be one of the most important novels in which a Holocaust survivor recorded their experiences. The novel has since been translated into more than 30 languages and is read in schools throughout the United States and worldwide. Unfortunately, he lost his father, mother, and little sister, as well as innumerable friends and more distant relatives. Wiesel was sixteen years old when he was liberated by the United States Army in April of 1945. The novel follows Wiesel’s experiences during the Holocaust and WWII. The original edition was written in Yiddish and then in French.
Night, in the version most commonly read today, was published in 1960.
0 kommentar(er)
