pag 47-65

In the new camp, Buna, they were well received by the other Jews, according to them, it was a good camp, but the most important thing was not to be sent to the construction Kommando.They passed by the showers and after that they knew their new leader, he was a fat German, and he like children very much. He told Ellie to give him his shoes, but Ellie refused to give them to him. The leader helped him to stay with his father in the new Kommando.The next days, he was checked by the doctors and by a dentist who noticed he had a gold crown in his teeth, and he was listed by his number.They were assigned to the orchestra block, in which there was music at all times, and they had to march, al ways the same. After that, they were told to go out while marching; Ellie and his father knew new neighbors, the musicians. According to them the work was not difficult, just a little bit tired, at the end it was a good Kommando. The unique bad thing was the Kapo, he had bad moments, so they had to be out of his way.In the work he was near his father, he felt very happy. There they met Yossi and Tibi, two brothers whose parents had already died.One day, Ellie was told to go after the meal to meet the dentist. When he was there he told the dentist he didn’t feel ok, so he asked for some time to feel better, the dentist said yes. Of course it was all an excuse, but he returned a week later with the same excuse, the dentist agreed with the child and he allowed coming back later. A week after the dentist was taken and exterminated, his gold crown was safe, he was glad, and he didn’t feel pity for the man.He knew a French girl from the work, but she never spoke, Ellie thought he didn’t know German. One day he was hit by Idek, when he was mad at nothing. Ellie crossed his path and he started hitting him, as Ellie didn’t shout the Kapo thought it was a defiance sign so he continued hitting him until he calmed down.After this the Kapo sent him to work again, as if nothing had happened.Blood was everywhere in his body and the French girl smiled at him, after a moment of fear; she neared and told him not to be afraid, in an almost perfect German.Years later, after the liberation Ellie found this girl in the metro, in Paris.He spoke to her for a long time, and he found out that she was a Jew and she spoke German.One day Franek noticed his gold crown and told him to give it to him, after a lot of fights. Franek got the crown because a dentist took it out with a spoon. He sometimes received and extra soup. Two weeks later Poles were transferred to another camp.After the Poles left he had a horrible experience, he discovered Idek was with a girl, and he started laughing, but Idek knew who was the person who was spying him and he received a punishment for that. He was given 25 lashes in front of all the Jews, then he had to stand up and he was told not to say anything to anyone.Days after, the alert started sounding. Everybody was ordered to go inside the blocks, the camp seemed abandoned, but in middle of the street were two cauldrons of soup, all of them were hungry and wanted the soup but just one person decided to go for it, he was eating when someone shot and killed him. By that moment the factory was being bombed, all the Jews were happy to know it, even they were happy to clear the ruins.Another day, Ellie remember a special hanging where an Oberkapo who was giant and good person, was the victim.He was called pipel, and he was extremely beautiful, like an angel. After come situations the pipel was tortured, for possessing arms but he remained silent, then he was condemned to death.In a roll call, they were going to die. All the Jews were looking at the boy, even the Lagerkapo refused to act as executioner, and the child keep silent. At one moment, the three chairs of the three men were removed, the two men died, but the child was still breathing, and he remained like that for more than half an hour, and the others were forced to look how the angel lingered between life and death.Behind Ellie was a man asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?”

..!!

Why were the prisoners tattooed or marked on their forearms? Does this action have a religious implication? Why?
Jews in the Holocaust were tattooed to be identified by the “authorities” of the camps. These were the reasons they gave for the tattoos, but I think there are more foolish reasons for tattooing Jews, reason for making Jews feel as nothing.I think these types of actions were psychological, if the Jews had a number in which they were called by the officers, so they would feel as if they were Germany’s property and to try to keep them in line, as if the other actions were not enough for them.Germans tried to make them understand that they had no rights, and of course they didn’t have an identity, they had no name for the society, so they were given numbers just to be known by the officers. Jews didn’t have value in front of Germany, so how could they make them suffer a little bit more? Tattoos.Tattoos are not allowed by the Torah, this document is the most important book for Jews, and it’s supposed to be written by Moises himself. Tattoos are against this law, so Jews were even more humiliated by having a tattoo in their forearms. They were suffering because of their believes and Germans made them go against it.
Who were the Kapos? Why did their fellowmen fear these leaders?
The Kapos were prisoners who were trusted by the SS officers, they took charge of other prisoners in the camps, and they received orders from Nazis.If they obeyed all those orders, they would gain personal power and privileges from all the officers, so they would live better than the others.They were in charge of distributing the food, or they just collaborated on others Jew’s death. Most of them were persecuted after the war because of their crimes and brutality, their punishment could be prison or even death.They were feared because of their brutality, most of them seemed to enjoy these actions. They had the right to whip prisoners of minor charges. The worst parte is that some of them were Jewish, and they treated others with harsh treatments.
How did SS officers select their victims? Support your answer.
They select Jews because of the physical appearance, plus they had to do some proves, like running. They had to have the appearance of being strong enough to work on the factories, of being efficient.If the SS officers saw a person who was too skinny, a slow person, and a weak man, so they would surely write his number down. After the selection, they would have to go to the crematoria.
Page 71
“Listen carefully to what I am about to tell you.” For the first time, his voice quivered. “In a few moments, selection will take place. You will have to undress completely. Then you will go, one by one, before the SS doctors. I hope you will all pass. But you must try to increase your chances. Before you go into the next room, try to move your limbs, give yourself some color. Don’t walk slowly, run! Run as if you had the devil at your heels! Don’t look at the SS. Run, straight in front of you”He paused and then added:“And most important, don’t be afraid!”This was an example of how they had to show themselves in front of the SS officers. This was an advice from a Blockälteste, he knew how the SS would choose their victims, so he tried to tell them how to act, because they were doing that, acting.

extermination and concentration camps!!

rhombus: extermination camps circle: concentration camps


Bergen- Belzen: concentration camp
Aushwittz: both concentration and extermination camp
Dachau: concentration camp
Treblinka: extermination camp
buchenwald: concentration camp

night´s summary (23-46)

The train advanced for days and jews couldn´t even sit, they were tired, thirsty, hungry. During that period, a woman called Mrs. Schächter, kept shouting every time of the day, she said she say flames and fire, but when everybody went to the window they saw anything but darkness. Ellie thought that she will be shouting like that crazy women in a few days. After days of traveling they arrived to a place called Auschwitz and someone told that there were going to their final destination, they were told that there will be job, food and family for everyone. The train moved again and after some persons Mrs. Schächter began shouting ; some jews went to the window and they realized that after some false alarms, it was true. There were fire rising from a long chimney, and one second after they were order to leave the train. They arrived to Birkenau arround midnight. They were told to seperate in two groups: women and men. That was the last moment that Ellie saw hir mother and hir little sisters, but he didn´t notice so. He was shaking because the scare he had. Someone told his father and him to lie about his ages, to said that that he was 18 and his father 40. They passed the first step, they were not sent to the crematoria, they were still useful for the Nazis, Ellie thought of running into the electrified barbed wire, but he had to stay with his father, he was all the family left for him. They were alive but in some way they feel sad and with no reason to celebrate they were not dead.Ellie describes how the camp looked, he won’t forget that night until the day he stop breathing, all the images in his head were repulsive, he no longer believed in innocence, not even in dreams or hope.The next day the SS officers looked for strong men, they were lucky for not being chosen; otherwise they would have seen all their mates dying in the chimney. They were sent to the barber, they were forced to take out their clothes. Then some friends met each other and they started crying, I don’t know if they were because of finding the others alive or because Death was living with them.Next day, they wake up early and Kapos ordered them to run naked as the day before, then a hot shower came and finally they were given new clothes, better called uniforms, all of them were of different sizes so they began to exchange clothes. They were transferred to different barracks and finally they got out of the concentration camp, a great day of May, the sun was shining and they were walking to Auschwitz. The entrance had an inscription: Work makes you free.The first impression about the new camp was not that bad, they got some black coffee and soup, new clothes and at least, the first night they got their first human words until all this mess began, the man in charge told them good and helping words. They ate the same always, but that was not a problem, the also took naps.One day, some men tattooed numbers in on Ellie’s left arm, his new name was A-7713, he had no other name, after that they had a roll call, as always.Days went by, and then someone started to ask for Wiesel from Sighet, Ellie’s father. Later they realized the man who was asking was their relative, Reizel’s husband. Reizel was the sister of Ellie’s mother. He asked for Reizel, and Ellie had to lie, he saw his relative’s face and he couldn’t say the truth, he said Reizel and the children were ok, but Ellie’s mother hadn’t received any letter from her sister since 1940.After a long time, their relative decided to go for news and they didn’t see him again. Sometimes Ellie asked himself where might be his mother and his sister, his dad tried to tell him they were ok, they pretended to believe so but at the end they knew that couldn’t be true.They left too, after few some days, they were sent to a new camp: Buna.

ghetto!!

What´s a ghetto?
The word ghetto actually comes from the Italian word for slag, an unfortunate by-product of metal production. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Jews were only allowed to live in Venice and other major European cities for 15 days a year. The least desirable property in the city of Venice was near the slag production site, an area also known for its frequent flooding. The entire Jewish population of Venice lived in cramped houses in a two or three block area surrounding the cooling piles of slag.
This practice of maintaining a Jewish ghetto in the most undesirable sections of a city continued for several centuries, although many of the Jewish citizens did manage to improve their financial and social circumstances. Some Jewish ghettos were actually considered fairly affluent in their day, rivaling their Christian counterparts. By the middle of the 19th century, the last Jewish ghetto areas had been integrated into cities and the Jewish population was no longer restricted to one particular region.
During World War II, however, Adolph Hitler decided to revive the idea of the Jewish ghetto in an effort to contain the European Jewish "problem". Perhaps the most famous Jewish ghetto was located in Warsaw, Poland, but a number of other major cities also constructed isolated and guarded areas reserved for Jews and other enemies of the state. Life in a Jewish ghetto was hellish, with severe restrictions on food, medicine and other basic essentials. Suicides were a common occurrence, as citizens of the ghetto learned the fate of others who had already been shipped out to the concentration camps. Jewish leaders attempted to maintain their own government within the walls of the ghetto, but the Nazi embargo on essential supplies created nearly unbearable conditions.
In modern times, the term ghetto has been applied to any number of urban areas with concentrated populations of the same ethnic or social group. Originally, the innermost area of a major city was designed to be the most desirable living arrangement for workers. Inner city neighborhoods were designed to provide goods and services for their inhabitants, along with reliable transportation to and from the industrial sections of town. Eventually, however, those who could afford to move into suburban areas abandoned the inner city areas, essentially creating a financial and social ghetto for those who could not afford to leave.
When many of the city-based industries also moved to greener pastures, residents of the inner cities were dealt another financial blow. Unemployment rates in the ghetto shot up, along with crime rates and high school drop-out rates. Many inhabitants of an urban ghetto feel trapped in their surroundings, unable to raise enough money to leave but also reluctant to abandon their neighborhoods to gangs and other criminal elements. Life in a modern ghetto is notoriously difficult, but some do manage to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty and work towards improving the lives of their families and friends still struggling in the ghetto

Where did the Nazi army seattle those ghettos?
The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939.The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.In some ghettos, members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings. The largest of these was the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943. There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos. In August 1944, German SS and police completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in Lodz.

What’s the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp?
concentration camp: In general terms, a concentration camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war. The prisoners there are kept under harsh and barely livable conditions and are detained and confined. the jewish people, and all the other people that disagreed with hitler were sent to. The jews, or the other people, either died of starvation, shot to death, gassed in a small room (and their corpses burned) in small ovens. The others survived.
Extermination camp: refer to camps whose primary function is or was genocide. These camps were built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. These facilities were called “concentration camps” because those imprisoned there were physically “concentrated” in one location.

Elie Wiesel!

Elie Wiesel's statement, "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all..."stands as a succinct summary of his views on life and serves as the driving force of his work. Wiesel is the author of 36 works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide. He was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania. During the World War II, his family and he were sent to the German concentration camps where his parents and little sister died.In his childhood, he spent a lot of time talking with Moshe in the synagogue.In 1942, Elie hade his bar mitzvah and he continued studying the Bible and other Jewish books, he felt really attracted to Kabbalah. He learned a little bit about astrology, parapsychology, hypnotism and magic.He and his two older sisters survived, they were freed from Buchenwald in 1945. He got in touch with them in 1947.He was taken to Paris, he studied at the Sorbonne and he became a journalist, he is also a novelist and a Nobel Prize winner. Due to a fateful car accident in New York in 1956, Wiesel spent a year confined to a wheelchair while recovering. It was during this year that he made the decision to become a U.S. citizen and is still today an active figure within our society, as well as fulfilling his role in Jewish politics around the world. Always maintaining his dedicated belief that although all the victims of the Holocaust were not Jewish, all Jews were victims of the Holocaust, Wiesel advocated placing the major emphasis of the memorial on the annihilation of the Jews, while still remembering the murder of other groups. Guided by the unique nature of the Holocaust and the moral obligation to remember, the Commission decided to divide and emphasize the museum into areas of memorial, museum, education, research, commemoration and action to prevent recurrence. In order to come to these decisions, a group of 57 members of the Commission and Advisory Board -- including Senators, Rabbis, Christians, professors, judges, Congressmen, Priests, Jews, men and women -- traveled to Eastern Europe, Denmark and Israel to study Holocaust memorials and cemeteries and to meet with other public officials. The emotional pain and commitment required by such a trip is remarkable, and Wiesel's leadership is undeniably noteworthy. He has dedicated his life to help persons who have suffered of racism and the ones who survived the Holocaust.In 1969, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, a divorced woman from Austria. In 1972, they had a son who they named Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, after Wiesel’s father.

Background!!

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" anIn 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War 2. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators
killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program. d that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. When Hitler came to have power in Germany he started giving speeches about the “inferior races” such as the Jews. He was supported by many politicians of that moment and that was the beginning of a great massacre.They began with the media, anyone or anything who was opposing to the Nazi’s Rules were removed, like television, newspapers, radio and books. They burned a lot of books, mainly the one which were written by Jews, like Einstein.According to Hitler, Jews were blamed of being the cause of the Germany’s problems, like economy.Jews began to be treated well after the World War I, they had permission to work, to participate in any kind of activities, to have their own business, even they won a lot Nobel Prices, and fourteen of thirty eight prices were won by Jews.Then, something changed, they were proclaimed as second-class citizens.They were segregated from other people, Nazis destroyed their buildings, synagogues and they were not able to have business anymore. Jews were arrested every day, even women and children with no reason, just hate.Jews were not the only race who was hated by the Nazis, black people, gypsies, scientists [who had the idea of changing the world in a better place], Jehovah’s witnesses and homosexual people were also burned and killed.Many of them were put in concentration camps or prisons.Jews tried to escape to other countries, they asked to be saved, but countries just made the escape more difficult, many of them made them harder to go out of Europe. Most of them weren’t able to get a visa.The entire world criticized Germany because of Jew’s killing but they didn’t do anything to solve the problem.

places in the book!

Birkenau, Poland is located in the south-center of poland.

Sighet, Transylvania, is located in the north of romania.

night

The story begin telling us about a man called "Moishe the Beadle", that was a poor man, who didn´t want to be help by the other jews, he like to be alone and he always pray, he did it because he like to be in "touch" with god, asking him questions, real questions. There was a family that was composed by mom, dad, he and two sisters. His dream was to study kabbalah but his father tried to convince him not to do that until he grew up. One day he found Moishe and they started to talk, they wasted all their afternoon talking about religion , so after the talk Moishe decided to teach the little kid the difficult Kabbalah. One day all the jews were transported to some place, and between all of them there was Moishe, so after that the days for the kid were sad and boring. After a lond time Moishe returned to Sighet, and triedo to tell the jews that what was happening in Europe was really bad, that his trip was a lie and that the ones who were in charge of his transportation let him die somewhere, of course nobody believed him because of the century it was almost impossible for someone to do that. After some time things started to become better in Sighet, and goods news started to circulate, one of the most important new was that Geremany was not entering to their territory, but three days later, the Germanies appeared. After all, Germans were kind with jews and all the ones who were afraid, start thinking that Germany people were innocents, but then they were forced to wear the yellow star, it was not lethal, at least that was what people thought at that time. After that, ghettos were created and the boy and his family were sent to the biggest one, they were afraid again, but the days passed by and they recovered hope, the ghettos weren’t that bad, it was like a little city, they all know each other and they can be with their family. Everything was normal until some things bad started to occur, a Jew policeman was called and after being nervous almost all the night, he came back, according to him they were going somewhere else, a journey. They cannot take valuable objects with them, and they can just have some belongings, almost everyone (including the family) was scared but they don´t wanted to show any kind of weakness, Next day, all the Jews were forced to go out and stand in the ground with the sun, thirsty and tired, some jews were taken to the train, some of them stayed in home until the other day. Finally, the family were taken to the train, they were aprox. 80 persons by car, no one was able to escape, and if they tried they were killed, they start going to their cruel destiny!!