Night

Another important theme in Night is the dehumanization of the Jews as a result of the systematic brutality they suffer at the hands of the Nazis. The Nazis employed a strategy of dehumanization that followed an insidious logic. First, the Nazis deprived the Jews of the individual identities, rights, and privileges of autonomous human beings so that they could be classified as sub-human and treated as animals. The Nazis achieved this by imprisoning and exploiting victim populations for labor, subjecting them to bestial living conditions. They separated families, tattooed identification numbers on the prisoners, exposed them to wanton violence, degradation and cruelty, and selected those unfit for survival to be executed and cremated, all the while demonstrating their absolute power of life and death over their victims. Reduced to a sub-human category, Jews, gypsies, and other undesirable groups could be treated as if they were animals and executed and disposed of without any moral or ethical qualms.

Many of the episodes in Night describe this progressive process of dehumanization. Arriving in Sighet, the Nazis begin by restricting the Jews’ movements and imposing sanctions upon them, including confiscating their valuables. They are identified as a target population by being forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing. Ultimately, they are forced to relocate into two ghettoes, which are walled off from the rest of the town by barbed wire. When the ghettoes are emptied, the Jews are herded together into crowded cattle cars for deportation to Auschwitz. Anxious and thirsty in these cramped conditions, the social pressures of civility and morality begin to break down among the deportees. Young couples copulate openly in the midst of the other passengers, who try to ignore them. Madame Schächter is violently and repeatedly beaten and bound by several young deportees to silence her screams, as others voice their approval of this behavior.

The barbarity that begins to manifest itself on the train to Auschwitz increases as soon as the deportees reach the camp. Jewish prisoners bludgeon and accost the deportees, driving them out of the train, where family members are immediately separated by gender. Forced to walk past the pits of burning bodies where they fear they will be massacred, the deportees are psychologically terrorized. They are stunned and unable to think, brutalized and intimidated by the inhumanity of the experience. As they descend over the next few months into the monotony of camp life, indiscriminate violence, constant hunger and suffering, and the weakening of religious faith increasingly erode the prisoners’ will to live and capacity for empathy and sympathy with each other. They abuse and predate upon each other to gain a scrap of food, or a gold crown that can be used for barter.

The effect of continuous psychological trauma, beatings, malnourishment, and the erasure of their individual identities as autonomous human beings is apathy and selfishness. The longer Eliezer and the other prisoners remain in the camps, the more emotionally desensitized they become to Nazi atrocities. Dehumanizing conditions lead to loss of dignity and weakened moral conscience. Starved and dejected, the prisoners increasingly act with self-centered animal instinct. This transformation is made explicit during the forced march to Gleiwitz when, overcome with exhaustion, they are described as running like a herd of animals, and again when they violently attack and kill each other for scraps of bread thrown into the cattle cars on the train to Buchenwald. Under such extreme conditions, the veneer of moral, social, and humane conduct collapses, and they revert to animal behavior.

The dehumanization of the Jews is as repugnant to Eliezer as the Nazis’ cruel treatment of them. Ashamed by its effects, he struggles guiltily against the inner voice that undermines his sense of obligation to his father. Once his father dies, Eliezer loses the moral focus of his life and becomes emotionally catatonic, indifferent to anything but food.

Against the steady backdrop of dehumanization, Eliezer’s narrative also focuses on those moments when he witnesses the resilience of the human spirit and the ideals of love, loyalty and beauty shining forth against the Nazi evil. Juliek’s violin playing and Rabbi Eliahou’s search for the son who abandoned him are examples of the survival of human feeling in the long night of the concentration camp.

The central human relationship in Night is that of father and son. Once Eliezer and his father are separated from the boy’s mother and sisters upon their arrival at Birkenau-Auschwitz, the two rely on each other’s support to endure concentration camp life. They share rations and try to protect each other from violence, encouraging each other with hopeful thoughts. As the conditions of their imprisonment continue to deteriorate and Eliezer and his father weaken, the boy’s relationship with his father becomes the sole prop of his existence, his main reason to survive. Longing for death during the march to Gleiwitz, Eliezer realizes the selfishness of his desire as he catches sight of his father running alongside him. To slip to the side of the column and die from an SS bullet would leave his father without any protector. Their loyalty to each other is a sacred bond, and, as Eliezer comes to realize, it is the only sacred thing remaining in the desecrated world of their imprisonment. Before they were deported from Sighet, Eliezer honored his father as traditional custom dictated, even though he disagreed with him. Witnessing the suffering his father endures in the camps fills Eliezer with a sense of filial devotion and tender affection he has never experienced before.

One measure of the extent of Nazi cruelty is the degree to which the bond of father and son is damaged by the brutally dehumanizing conditions of imprisonment. Though they do what they can to support each other, Eliezer is ultimately unable to protect his father from being physically abused, and this fills him with shame and guilt. During his narrative, he notes with implicit horror and sadness several instances of sons attacking or abandoning their fathers. These sad displays reinforce his sense of devotion to his own father, and Eliezer prays he will never do the same. As his father grows weaker and falls ill after the evacuation from Buna, however, intrusive thoughts that the old man has become a burden to him fill Eliezer with even more shame and guilt. Eliezer is outraged by the lack of concern the doctors have for the sick man, stricken with dysentery, yet he does not intervene when his father is brutally struck in his sickbed, receiving a fatal blow. Nor does he respond to his father’s call to him by name, the last word his father speaks. Eliezer gazes silently at him on his deathbed for over an hour, burning the image of his father’s bloody face into his memory.