NIGHT

BY: ELIE WEISEL

“I remember : it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night.”

Elie Weisel – Nobel Acceptance Speech

THE HOLOCAUST

• The Holocaust began in January 1933 when Hitler came to power and technically ended on May 8, 1945 (VE Day)

• Between 1933 and 1945, more than 11 million men, women, and children were murdered in the Holocaust. Approximately six million of these were Jews.

• The “Final Solution” was constructed during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Fourteen high-ranking Nazis met in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and presented a program to deport all Jews to Poland where the SS would kill them

• Hitler was able to build a network of over 1,000 concentration camps in several ways. First, he established a legal basis for acts of brutal inhumanity by creating the Enabling Act, which allowed him to do whatever he wanted. Second, he used propaganda and media to dehumanize Jewish people and, finally, he used a system of brutality to terrorize the people into submission

• During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany became a genocide state, a government dedicated to the annihilation of the Jews. Every arm of the government played a role. Parish churches provided the birth records of the Jews. The Finance Ministry took Jewish wealth and property. Universities researched more efficient ways to murder. And government transportation bureaus paid for the trains that carried the Jews to their death

• Over 1.1 million children died during the Holocaust.c

• Young children were particularly targeted by the Nazis to be murdered during the Holocaust. Many children suffocated in the crowded cattle cars on the way to the camps. Those who survived were immediately taken to the gas chambers

CONSENTRATION CAMPS

• Over one million people were murdered at the Auschwitz complex, more than at any other place. The Auschwitz complex included three large camps: Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz

• The majority of people who were deported to labor and death camps were transported in cattle wagons. These wagons did not have water, food, a toilet, or ventilation. Sometimes there were not enough cars for a major transport, so victims waited at a switching yard, often with standing room only, for several days. The longest transport of the war took 18 days. When the transport doors were open, everyone was already dead

GAS CHAMBERS

• Carbon monoxide was originally used in gas chambers. Later, the insecticide Zyklon B was developed to kill inmates. Once the inmates were in the chamber, the doors were screwed shut and pellets of Zyklong B were dropped into vents in the side of the walls, releasing toxic gas.

• Gas in the chambers during the Holocaust entered the lower layers of air first and then rose slowly toward the ceiling, which forced victims to trample one another in an attempt to breathe. Stronger victims were often found on top of the pile of bodies.

• Signs on the entrance to the gas chambers read: “Baths and disinfecting rooms.” Other notices read: “Cleanliness brings freedom!” It took 20 minutes to kill everyone in the chamber. The chambers at Auschwitz/Birkenau could kill 6,000 people a day.

• Prisoners, mainly Jews, called Sonderkommando were forced to bury corpses or burn them in ovens. Because the Nazis did not want eyewitnesses, most Sonderkommandos were regularly gassed, and fewer than 20 of the several thousand survived. Some Sonderkommandos buried their testimony in jars before their deaths. Ironically, the Sonderkommandos were dependent on continued shipment of Jews to the concentration camps for staying alive

• At the entrance to each death camp, there was a process of Selektion or Selection. Pregnant women, small children, the sick or handicapped, and the elderly were immediately condemned to death.

• Concentration camp laborers were forced to run in front of SS officers to show that they still had strength. The SS officers directed the runners into one of two lines. One line went to the gas chambers. The other went back to the barracks. The runners did not know which line went where

INHUMANITY

• At Auschwitz, thousands of prisoners were sterilized using radiation. Additionally, children of African-German origin and the mentally or physically handicapped were surgically sterilized, often brutally.

• The Nazis would process Holocaust victims’ hair into felt and thread. Hair was also used to make socks for submarine crews, ignition mechanisms in bombs, ropes and cords for ships, and stuffing for mattresses.

• British troops liberating Bergen-Belsen found that the Nazis had experimented using human skin for lampshades

• To further the façade of “cleanliness,” SS men dressed as doctors pretended to “examine” the victims before they were unknowingly gassed. The real purpose of the procedure was to mark victims who had gold teeth in their mouths so their corpses could be set aside after gassing

THE AFTERMATH

• Soviet soldiers were the first to liberate the death camps. On July 23, 1944, they liberated Majdanek. Most of the world initially refused to believe the Soviet reports of the horrors they found there

• In August 1945, the Allied powers created the International War Crimes Tribunal, which included judges from the U.S., Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. Never before in history had the losers of a nation at war been held to answer for their crimes before an international court

• After WWII, the Allies grappled with whether to hold only the Nazi leaders accountable for the Holocaust or the whole German nation

• After the war, the Allies felt that the German people should know the crimes committed during the Holocaust. Many citizens were forced to view bodies found at the concentration camps.

ELIE WIESEL

• Born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania

• Pursued Jewish religious studies before his family was forced to relocate to Nazi death camps during WWII

Early Life• At the age of 15, Wiesel

and his entire family were sent to Auschwitz as part of the Holocaust

• Wiesel lived in the camps under deplorable, inhumane conditions, gradually starving,

Survival• Was ultimately freed

from Buchenwald in 1945

• Of his relatives, only he and two of his sisters survived.

Writing• Wiesel went on to study at

the Sorbonne in France from 1948-51 and took up journalism

• Wiesel would publish in Yiddish the memoir And the World Would Remain Silent in 1956. The book was shortened and published in France asLa Nuit, and as Night for English readers in 1960

The Nobel Peace Prize• Wiesel won the Nobel

Peace Prize in 1986, and later founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with his wife Marion (Erster Rose) Wiesel.

• Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. • Elie Wiesel