100 pages 3 hours read

Elie Wiesel

Night

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1956

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Key Figures

Eliezer Wiesel

The first-person narrator of Night, Eliezer is 12 when the story begins in 1941. Living in a Jewish community in Sighet, Transylvania, he is deported with the other Jews from the town after it falls under Nazi control in 1944. He is immediately separated from his mother and sisters when the deportation train arrives at Birkenau-Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. However, he and his father are able to stay close to each other at the camp and at several other camps to which they are moved over the next year.

Eliezer and his father encourage and support each other during their internment, sharing rations and protecting each other from the sudden and wanton violence of camp life. However, Eliezer’s devotion to his father begins to weaken as the ordeal of surviving the brutal conditions of imprisonment grows ever more difficult for both of them. As his father succumbs to illness and his will to live fades, Eliezer takes on the role of caregiver for the dying man. He witnesses an SS guard striking his father with a truncheon, fracturing his skull, as the old man begs his son for a drink of water. His father dies shortly afterward, and Eliezer’s

blurred text

blurred text

Related Titles

By Elie Wiesel

Study Guide

logo

Hope, Despair and Memory

Elie Wiesel

Hope, Despair and Memory

Elie Wiesel

Study Guide

logo

Never Shall I Forget

Elie Wiesel

Never Shall I Forget

Elie Wiesel

Plot Summary

logo

The Forgotten

Elie Wiesel

The Forgotten

Elie Wiesel

Study Guide

logo

The Perils of Indifference

Elie Wiesel

The Perils of Indifference

Elie Wiesel