By: Elie Wiesel “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.” Night Introduction By: Elie Wiesel “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.”

About the Holocaust

Brainstorm Before we talk about the author, what do we already know about the Holocaust? Who was involved? What happened? When did it happen?

Holocaust Overview Genocide is the systematic elimination of all or a significant part of a racial, ethnic, religious, or national group. The Holocaust involved the genocide of six million Jews (one million of which were children) and another five million non-Jews that included Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, the mentally and physically disabled, and Soviet POWs.

Holocaust Overview The Holocaust was led by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they thought they were racially superior and that the Jews were racially inferior and a threat to the German racial community. The Holocaust lasted from 1941 to 1945, which was during WWII (1939-1945).

Novel Terminology

memoir: a literary nonfiction genre; a collection of memories where an individual writes about moments or events, both public or private, that took place in the author's life. Talmud: central text of Rabbinic Judaism (Jewish religion); equivalent to the Bible in Christianity. cabbala: an ancient Jewish mystical tradition based on an esoteric (private/secret) interpretation of the Old Testament.

Gestapo: official secret police for Nazi Germany Boches: a German soldier Kapos: prisoner of a concentration camp who was assigned by the SS guard to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks in the camp. SS: protection squadron of the Nazi Party that carried out multiple violent crimes.

About Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was born September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania (present day Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania). He grew up in a small village where his life revolved around the following: Family Religious Study Community God

In 1944 during WWII, when Elie was 15, he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. They were to become slave laborers. They endured beatings, excessive work, starvation, and other torture; death was always in the air. In some camps toward the end of the war, the SS (part of Nazi soldiers) began evacuating prisoners and killing 10,000 people a day.

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After he was freed from concentration camp on April 11, Wiesel became sick with intestinal problems. After several days in the hospital, Wiesel wrote an outline for a book describing the Holocaust. He wasn’t ready to publicize his experience but promised he would in ten years.

After the hospital, Elie went with 400 other orphan children to France. From 1945-1947, he moved from house to house found for him by Children’s Rescue Society. By 1947, he was reunited with both of his surviving sisters, Bea and Hilda.

Wiesel’s turning point came when he interviewed a Catholic writer. Throughout the following years, Wiesel was very depressed and considered suicide. He traveled as a reporter. Wiesel’s turning point came when he interviewed a Catholic writer. During the interview, everything was centered around Jesus, and Wiesel ended up saying the following: "…ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more, than Christ on the cross. And we don’t speak about them."

Wiesel ran out of the room, but the author followed and advised Wiesel to write down his experience. Elie spent a year working on the 862 page manuscript he called And the World Was Silent; his publisher returned it as a 258 page book called Night. The book was published first in France in 1958 and then in the U.S. in 1960. The book is autobiographical and told of his experiences during the Holocaust; it also is his personal account of his loss of religious faith.

In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize as “a messenger to mankind” and “a human being dedicated to humanity.” He explained his actions by saying the whole world knew what was happening in the concentration camps but did nothing. “That is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.”