Night Study Guide - “Less Than Human”

Night STUDY GUIDE: “Less Than Human” (Critical Reading) Chapter Outlines: Chapter 1: The book starts in the Jewish community of Sighet in Transylvania/Hungary. It is 1941, three years before Elie and his family are deported. Elie describes his relationship with Moishe the Beadle, a well-liked homeless Jewish mystic. When Moishe, as a foreign Jew, is deported to a mysterious location, Elie assumes he’ll never see Moishe again. However, Moishe returns to Sighet in 1942. He begins warning the other Jews in the Hungarian community of Sighet about the concentration camps/cruelty of the Germans. Moishe barely escaped with his life and feels it is his duty to tell everyone. However, no one believes him. The war seems very far off, and the Jews of Sighet doubt all of the rumors coming from occupied German territories. The purposeful annihilation of Jews seems an impossible thing. These doubts seem to be justified when the Germans first arrive. The Hungarian government welcomes them. They behave respectfully, and the optimists of Sighet tells everyone that “these Germans” are nice. Slowly, the Germans take control of the community, at first taking all valuable items from families, then closing the synagogues, then forcing the Jews to wear the yellow star, then live in segregated, low-resource neighborhoods called ghettos. Eventually, the Jews are told to evacuate the ghettos, though no one knows where they are being taken. The Jews are allowed to take only what they can fit in one bag onto the train. Elie and his family are some of the last to evacuate the ghetto. Eventually, they are loaded into a cramped train car, and the whistle blows. They do not know where they are going. Chapter 2: While on the train, conditions are cramped. Madame Schachter, a woman who had lost her husband and older sons to a mistaken evacuation, begins screaming about a fire only she can see. She keeps pointing in the same place. At first, the other Jewish passengers try to reason with her, but eventually her screaming makes them lose patience. They tie her up and gag her, but when that does not work, they begin to beat her to keep her quiet. Eventually, though, as the train pulls closer to their destination, Madame Schachter resumes screaming about a fire, pointing out the window. The other passengers now see the massive furnace of the concentration camp’s crematorium. The train arrives at Auschwitz, a word the Hungarian Jews had never heard. Chapter 3: Elie is separated immediately from his mother and younger sister, Tzipora—he never sees them again. Elie is told to lie about his age so he can stay with his father. Around him, he sees the crematorium and burning pits filled with bodies—including bodies of children. Elie has a hard time believing that what he is seeing could be real: how could something this terrible be happening? Elie and his father are pointed towards the crematorium, but realize they are actually in the line to be used as laborers. Elie describes his first night at camp as something he will never forget. Elie and his father are systematically dehumanized: stripped naked, shaved, deloused, and tattooed. One of the heads of their “block,” a Polish Jew, gives them some encouragement. Although they are in a horrible situation in a concentration camp, he urges them that their only means of surviving is to look out for each other. This man is replaced for being too nice. Before being moved to a labor camp, Elie and his father connect with a distant in-law who is desperate for news of his wife and children. Elie’s father doesn’t recognize this man, but Elie does, and he lies to the man that his wife wrote a recent letter. He does this so that the man will not lose all hope. However, at the end of the chapter, a train arrives with more prisoners from this man’s region. He gets the ‘real news,’ and Elie never sees him again. Elie and his father are then marched to Buna, a subcamp of Auschwitz used for labor. Chapter 4: The other prisoners describe Buna as a camp you can survive, “so long as you are in a good unit.” Chapter 4 is filled with instances of prisoners being cruel to each other in a way to prove they are worth keeping alive. Elie slowly assimilates into camp life; trying to stay with his father first and foremost, but also adjusting to Idek’s (the kapo of Elie’s block) rough temper and avoiding the camp dentist, a Czechoslovakian Jew, who has been told to extract Elie’s gold crown. When the camp dentist is found to be hoarding the prisoner’s gold teeth for himself, he is executed. Elie is able to keep his crown until Franek, a Polish Jew, forces Elie to give the crown to him. When Elie initially refuses, Franek uses Elie’s father inability to march in time as an excuse to viciously beat him every day in front of Elie. Elie eventually surrenders his tooth when he realizes this can’t go on. Elie begins to have warped priorities. One time, when Idek beats Elie’s father, Elie finds himself being angry at his father for getting in the way, rather than angry at Idek. Elie receives a snatch of comfort from a French forced labor inmate, who passes Elie some bread after Elie is beaten by Idek for nothing. This girl had been passing as Aryan and solely French, but she revealed in this brief moment that she was Jewish and spoke perfect German. Idek continues being cruel to Elie, including whipping him in front of the entire camp when Elie accidentally caught Idek forcing the prisoners to leave so he could sleep with a girl in the barrack. Elie forms a strange relationship with death, as he sees so much of it, including public hangings now. He begins not to care so long as he gets to eat his meal. This attitude continues until one horrible day when a child, a pipel, is hung. Since the child is so small, it takes a long time for him to die. Elie is brought face to face with what is happening to him and the other prisoners; this is what awaits him. He begins to spiral mentally. Chapter 5: The Jews are forced to participate in “selection.” They will have to run naked past Dr. Mengele and other SS doctors. This is to see which of them are still serviceable workers and which of them are “fit for the furnaces.” Elie passes inspection and is overjoyed that they did not write him down, but his celebration is drawn up short when it is revealed that his father’s number was written down. Elie’s father passes the second selection. At this point, Elie develops an infected wound on his foot. He is taken to the hospital, where a Jewish doctor treats him. Elie gets regular food and a bed in the hospital, but is warned by another prisoner to escape when he can—“Germany doesn’t need sick Jews.” There are rumors that the Soviet army is getting closer and closer. The SS have begun evacuating prisoners. When Elie hears that the prisoners have a choice between staying at Buna or being evacuated somewhere else, Elie asks his father what they should do. Elie makes the decision to be evacuated with his father. Elie’s father says he hopes they will not regret it. After the war, Elie finds out that the prisoners who stayed were simply liberated by Soviet forces two days later. Chapter 6: The Jews are forced to run to their next location. It is a death march—people are literally dying as they go. At the end of their first day, an elderly prisoner named Rabbi Eliahou begins asking around, looking for his son. Elie at first says he has not seen the son, but then privately realizes that he did see Rabbi Eliahou’s son. He remembers seeing the son deliberately run faster than his father so that Rabbi Eliahou is lost in the crowd. Elie thinks he did this to be free of the burden of an elderly father. He privately swears to never be like that son, though he recognizes the temptation, since his own father is also weak. Crouched in the snow, Elie sees piles of corpses of prisoners who simply gave up and died where they laid down to sleep. Elie’s father encourages him to keep going, but Elie does not know why. When they arrive at Gliewitz, another camp, they are so packed into the barracks that Elie wakes up being smothered by another body. He has a brief exchange with Juliek, a PolishJewish prisoner he knew from Buna. Juliek is worried the other prisoners will break his violin. That night, Elie hears beautiful music. It is Juliek, playing forbidden Beethoven. The next morning, Juliek is dead. The surviving prisoners are forced into a third ‘selection.’ Elie’s father is deemed too weak to keep living, but Elie causes a distraction by running to the line to grab his father. In the confusion, his father is allowed to join the ‘workers’ line. They are packed onto a train, 100 prisoners to a cattle car. Chapter 7: Elie has to slap his father on the train to prove he is alive to the prisoners helping the SS guards dispose of dead bodies. There is no roof on the train car, meaning prisoners are dying from exposure due to the weather. When they stop in a German town, a worker throws a piece of bread into the wagon, a seemingly kind act. However, the prisoners begin to maul each other over bread. Elie witnesses a son begin to beat his father to death over a morsel of bread. That son is then also beaten to death. Elie is traumatized by what he sees. Later, in their car, someone cries when a prisoner dies beside them. Copying this cry, the rest of the train begins a long howl of anguish and despair. Of the 100 prisoners who got in the cattle car with Elie, only 12 make it to Buchenwald alive. Chapter 8: Elie’s father contracts dysentery in Buchenwald. He is put in the hospital barracks, but the other prisoners mistreat him because of his constant moaning and inability to clean himself. Elie trades his ration of bread to stay in the barracks with his father, but begins to resent his father’s dependence on him—having to share food, having to look after him, having to defend him from the other prisoners. He realizes he is no better than Rabbi Eliahou’s son. A kapo at the camp flat out tells Elie to abandon his father as, according to this kapo, there is no such thing as father, brother, or friend in a concentration camp. One evening, during roll call, Elie hears his father call out his name despite being told by an SS guard to keep quiet. Elie’s father keeps calling him, and Elie deliberately does not answer. Elie is afraid that the SS guard will beat him as well as his father. The SS guard delivers a horrific blow to Elie’s father, which makes him be silent. After the guard leaves, Elie climbs down from his bunk and watches his father in silence. When he wakes up the next morning, someone else in his father’s bed. Elie’s father was taken to the crematorium. To Elie’s unending shame, his first thought is ‘free at last!’. Chapter 9: After Elie’s father’s death, Elie’s life holds no meaning except to eat. He is finally moved to the children’s barracks in Buchenwald and is later liberated by the prisoners who took control of the camp, then later by the American forces when they arrive. Upon leaving Buchenwald, Elie contracts food poisoning. He spends three weeks hovering between life and death. In the hospital once he’s recovered, Elie is able to look in a mirror. He had not looked at himself since they left the ghetto in the spring of 1944, a year ago. Elie does not recognize himself. He describes himself as a corpse, a dead thing separate from himself, staring at him. The book ends with Elie saying that the look in that corpse’s eyes has never left him.