Eliezer Wiesel's Night

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed” (Wiesel 43). Eliezer Wiesel was a Jewish prisoner in concentration camps during World War II and the Holocaust. His memoir Night follows his experience at many of the Nazi work camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Buna. His survival was dependent through many close calls and coincidences that allow him to survive. His first close call comes when he and his father enter Birkenau. At Birkenau, a man tells them to lie about their ages. Eliezer is fourteen and his father is fifty, Eliezer and his father tell the prisoner their ages and the prisoner’s response is, “No, not fifty. Forty. Do you understand?

He hears rumors of a selection on the third day, “On the third day, at dawn, we were driven out of the barracks...We were directed towards a gate which divided the camp into two. A group of SS officers were standing there. A rumor ran through our ranks--a selection!” (Wiesel 101). In the selection, those who can walk well are sent to the right and survive, those who are weak or sick are sent to the left and toward the crematoriums. When his father is sent to the left, Eliezer runs after his father. During the confusion, several people are able to switch to the right, among those Eliezer and his father. This allows his father and possibly Eliezer himself to survive. He had not yet been sorted and could have been sent to the left due to his foot injury.

Night is a memoir of coincidences and close calls. The theme of Night is living with guilt. Eliezer Wiesel survived the Holocaust despite the odds. He feels guilty that in someway, he was relieved that his father had died. He feels guilty because he survived when so many others died. He has to live with that guilt along with the tattoo that will forever remind him of the atrocities he