Elie Wiesel’s Night is a work of historical fiction based on his own experiences during the Holocaust. There are many reasons why Elie Wiesel decided to name his book “night”, including its symbolism of the cruelty of the Holocaust, as a symbol for death itself, and as a metaphor for his childhood.
Throughout the Holocaust, people (mostly Jews and enemies of the Nazi movement/party) were sent to concentration camps where they were forced to endure harsh conditions. Since the beginning of history, people all over the world have related the night to evil, darkness, and the unknown. Concentration camps had prisoners starved, beaten, and burned alive, each an act of great cruelty and heartlessness. Prisoners were subjected to such great torment that they, themselves, began to act like animals, cutting them down to their soul instinct, survival. Elie Wiesel describes this transformation from human to helpless creature on page 37, “The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded – and devoured – by a black flame.” Such was the horror of the Holocaust that, to the prisoners, life was like one long, unrelenting, night.
Death, though often a source of fear, and power, is rather, to some, a sanctuary. Many accounts of the Holocaust tell of people who would rather have chose death than deal with the injustices done to them by the Nazis. Death, eternal darkness, was used by the Nazis, and many other governments throughout the ages, to put down party opposition before it arose. Such fear of death was surpassed only by the pain inflicted upon prisoners residing in concentration camps. To them, death was their only solace. They could escape fear, pain, and suffering, finally being able to rest for eternity. This want for nothing more than an end to suffering is described in Night on page 105, “I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen.” This longing for darkness, for night, is portrayed in the book’s title.
In Judaism, night symbolizes beginning, creation. As translated from chapter 1 of the book of Genesis, Berishit, “Now the Earth was astonishingly empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep… And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good, and God separated between the light and between the darkness.” This was on the first day of creation and, as you can see, there was darkness before there was light. The same reason that Jewish holidays begin at sun-down rather than sun-up, is why Elie Wiesel decided to title his novel Night. He was only a child when he lived through the tragic events of the Holocaust, sixteen when his father was taken. These events not only took from him a normal childhood, but also the ability to live a “normal” life. It is impossible for him to have lived through such devastation unscathed. In fact he says, in the interview by PBS, that he had always felt that he should write a book about his experiences and that if he had not written Night, his first book, then he probably would have never written a book at all. Night symbolizes Elie Wiesel’s beginnings both as a child and as a writer.
The Holocaust showed the world the evils that humans were capable of towards one another. Elie Wiesel’s Night not only captures his experiences in the pages of the novel, but also in the title itself, describing the horrors of the Holocaust, the significance of death, and his own, tragic, childhood experiences.
