Night

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1956

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-9

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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

On the train, the prisoners are crowded together, some dying, some still alive. Eliezer cannot distinguish between the survivors and those who are dead; there is no difference in their appearance. Eliezer himself is emotionally indifferent: what difference does it make if he dies today, tomorrow, or the next day? He calls to his father, who is huddled motionlessly nearby, but he does not move. The train stops in the middle of a field, and the SS orders all the corpses to be thrown out of the cars. The survivors in the wagon, knowing this means more room for them, rejoice. Volunteers strip clothing from the bodies and toss the corpses out onto the frozen field. Two men approach Eliezer’s father, believing him to be dead. Eliezer slaps his father as hard as he can, and his eyes move slightly. The men move away. After twenty bodies are thrown from the wagon, the train resumes its slow journey through the snow.

One day, as the train passes through a German town, a workman tosses a piece of bread into Eliezer’s car. A stampede ensues as dozens of starving men fight for a few crumbs while the German workmen watch, amused. Eliezer notes the savageness of the scene:

Men threw themselves on top of each other, stamping on each other, tearing at each other […] Wild beasts of prey, with animal hatred in their eyes; an extraordinary vitality had seized them, sharpening their teeth and nails (102).

Spectators gather to watch the skeleton-thin men fighting to the death for a mouthful and begin tossing more pieces of bread into the cars. Eliezer notices an old man crawling away from the melee in his wagon, hiding a piece of bread in his shirt. As soon as he brings it to his mouth, a younger man attacks him with vicious blows. The older man cries out, imploring his son to recognize and stop beating him, saying he will share his piece of bread with him. The son steals it, as the father gives out a death rattle, and dies. However, the victor is not able to get far. Other men fall upon and murder the man. As they withdraw, the two corpses, father and son, lie beside the incredulous 15-year old Eliezer.

A few nights later, a prisoner attacks Eliezer and tries to strangle him. His father calls Meir Katz, a strongly-built man, who frees Eliezer from the anonymous assailant. A few days later, Meir confesses to Eliezer’s father that he can’t hold on. Many months after the death of his own son, taken in the first selection, he has finally reached the limit of his strength.

On the tenth—and last—day of the journey, an icy wind whips through the railroad cars. As the passengers try to move around to generate body heat, Eliezer hears the cry of a wounded animal from another car. Someone has just died. Soon, all the prisoners take up the cry, wailing their distress in abject desperation, like “the death rattle of a whole convoy who felt the end upon them” (104). Within a few hours, the train arrives at Buchenwald, another concentration camp. Only those who are able to stand are allowed out of the cars; the dead and dying are left inside. Meir Katz stays on the train. Of the 100 people who got into the wagon, only a dozen, including Eliezer and his father, get out.

Chapter 8 Summary

The prisoners are counted and ordered to form groups and proceed to the showers. The scene is chaotic; hundreds of prisoners crowd around the entrance and the guards are unable to keep order. Eliezer’s father is overcome with exhaustion and begs Eliezer to let him lie on a hillock of snow until they can get into the showers. He tells Eliezer weakly that he can go no further and will die here. Eliezer is enraged and implores his father to move. The argument goes on for a long time, and Eliezer feels he is “not arguing with him, but with death itself, with the death that he had already chosen” (107).

Sirens begin to wail, and the lights are extinguished in the camp. Guards drive the prisoners to the barracks blocks; exhausted, they collapse onto the beds without thought of availing themselves of the soup laid out in cauldrons. The next morning, Eliezer goes to look for his father, whom he abandoned when the alert sounded the previous night. He is shocked when he suddenly realizes that he hopes he won’t find his father; that without this dead weight, he could use all his strength for his own survival. He is immediately ashamed.

Eliezer searches for hours without finding his father. When he comes to the coffee dispensary, he hears his father’s plaintive voice. Burning with fever, he asks Eliezer for a drop of coffee. Eliezer fights his way through the crowd and manages to bring back a cupful, which his father consumes with “an animal gratitude” (108). Eliezer realizes the significance of his act: “with those few gulps of hot water, I probably brought him more satisfaction than I had done during my whole childhood” (108). Shaken by tremors, Eliezer’s father is denied food and told that since the sick will soon die, it would be a pity to waste food on them. Eliezer gives him what is left of his own soup, but does so against his own will, which saddens him.

Over the next few days, Eliezer’s father’s condition continues to deteriorate. Seeing his father after the prisoners take mandatory showers, the old man does not recognize his son and walks by him without answering Eliezer’s calls. He has a distant, visionary look in his eyes; Eliezer says “it was the face of someone else” (109). Stricken with dysentery, his father is confined to his bunk, surrounded by other invalids. Eliezer tries to encourage him, and at one point, his father suddenly tries to tell him where the gold and money can be found that he buried in their cellar. The effort exhausts his remaining strength, and he collapses. Eliezer trades a piece of bread for a bunk near his father and manages to get two doctors to look at him. The doctors are not interested, however, and the second verbally abuses the ill prisoners. Eliezer is filled with rage, accusing the doctors of being his father’s murderers. As he watches over him, he feels that although his father’s eyes are closed now, he can now see the truth in all things.

Neighboring prisoners beat Eliezer’s father because he is unable to drag himself outside to relieve himself. He begs Eliezer for a drink of water, even though it is the worst thing for his dysentery. Realizing he will die shortly, Eliezer gives him some to drink. A week passes as Eliezer’s father’s condition continues to deteriorate. The head of the barracks tells Eliezer he should stop giving his father his own ration of bread and instead should take his father’s for himself: “Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone” (111). Eliezer realizes the inescapable truth of his advice, but immediately feels guilty, refusing to concede to it.

After roll call, Eliezer returns to lie in a bunk near his father. Burning with fever, Eliezer’s father begs him for water. An SS guard orders the old man to be quiet, but Eliezer’s father does not hear him and continues calling to his son. The guard hits him on the head with a truncheon, fracturing his skull. Eliezer’s father rattles out his son’s name, breathing spasmodically. Eliezer stares at him for over an hour, burning the image of his blood-stained face into his mind. He climbs back into the top bunk to sleep. In the morning, another invalid is in his father’s bed; Eliezer assumes his father must have been taken to the crematory before dawn, possibly still alive, to be burnt. Eliezer is unable to cry—he has no more tears—but he feels that if he could dig deep into his weakened conscience, he might feel that he was free at last. It is January 29, 1945, three months before the German surrender.

Chapter 9 Summary

Eliezer stays in Buchenwald until April 11th, but he has little to say about these months until the camp is liberated. His father dead, his life is consumed by one desire: to eat. He is transferred to a children’s block, where he spends his days in total idleness, no longer thinking of his mother or father, just of an extra ration of soup.

On April 5th, all the Jews in the camp are ordered to the assembly place. The prisoners assume they are to be shot and return to their barracks. The next day, a general roll call is taken, and the head of the camp announces that Buchenwald is to be liquidated and the prisoners evacuated, with several thousand leaving each day. No more food will be distributed. By April 10th, 20,000 prisoners remain in the camp. The next day, the armed resistance within the camp attacks the SS with firearms and grenades. The battle is short, the SS flees, and by evening, American tanks arrive at the gates of Buchenwald.

Eliezer notes that the first thought of the liberated prisoners was of food, not revenge. They have eaten nothing but grass and potato peelings for six days. The following day, some of the young men go to Weimar to get food, clothes, and have sex with girls. Two days afterward, Eliezer becomes ill with food poisoning and is transferred to the hospital, where he lingers between life and death for two weeks. One day he is able to raise himself up to see himself in a mirror, something he hadn’t done since the ghetto: “From the depths off the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me” (116).

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

After the forced evacuation from Auschwitz, the prisoners are utterly exhausted, physically and mentally. On the train to Buchenwald, Eliezer is morally indifferent, as well; to live or die has become essentially the same thing. The prisoners’ lives are a living death, and life now has virtually no meaning or motivation. The brutality of the physical conditions they have been forced to endure has had a levelling effect, in which life itself is a form of death. The survivors are living corpses trapped in a prolonged night, surrounded by the dead and dying. The train’s slow passage through the frozen countryside is like a funeral procession of silent, condemned men: “[t]he days were like nights, and the nights left the dregs of their darkness in our souls […] We were no more than frozen bodies” (101). Eliezer only wakes from his apathy when two men prepare to throw his father from the cattle wagon, assuming he is dead.

Against this backdrop of passivity, silence and death, a savage spectacle of violence occurs when the prisoners fight like animals with each other over pieces of bread tossed into the cars by German townsfolk. The starving prisoners are willing to murder for a morsel of food, oblivious to any consideration other than the individual instinct for self-preservation. Eliezer doesn’t participate in the melee, but witnesses a son killing his father for a mouthful of bread, after which the son is murdered by two other passengers. The episode is the most striking representation of the inhumane and immoral behavior to which the Jews are driven after being so brutally treated by the Nazis. Like wild animals, they tear at each other viciously in the cattle wagons, while German workmen and villagers watch with amusement. In the utterly dehumanizing and degrading environment to which they are subjected, the prisoners no longer inhabit a human world of moral values and ethical behavior and descend to the level of predatory animals fighting for survival.

This savagery is echoed shortly thereafter, when Eliezer is nearly strangled to death in the car by an unknown assailant. A few days later, as an icy wind whips through the open cattle cars, the prisoners in Eliezer’s car begin to wail in utter desperation. The groaning and crying spreads to other cars like a contagious disease. It is a sound that seems to come from beyond the grave, the anguish of dying men reduced to a subhuman state who can bear no more, hurled against the wind and snow in a godless wasteland. All they seek now is death, a release from their misery.

In Chapter 8, Eliezer’s mood of apathy shifts to active concern as he becomes his father’s caregiver. Suffering from unbearable exhaustion and cold, Eliezer’s father no longer wants to live and begs his son to allow him to sleep in the snow, even though both know that means death. He has regressed to a child-like state of dependence, pleading with Eliezer to have mercy on him. Eliezer is torn with ambivalence; he realizes his father is a burden and that his own chances of survival would improve if he no longer had the responsibility of caring for him. At the same time, he abhors the idea of abandoning him, as Rabbi Eliahou’s son had abandoned his own father. The sacred bond of parent and child, the most fundamental human relationship, is at stake, and with it, Eliezer’s own identity as a human being. He is horrified and deeply pained by the haunting and recurring wish to be rid of his father.

The Nazis’ dehumanization of the Jews aims at destroying the filial bonds of parent and child. Eliezer’s moral universe has eroded to the extent that, increasingly, his only concern is for his own survival, and he fights this humiliating transformation vigorously. He battles ferociously with the crowd to secure a cup of coffee for his thirsty father and shares his rations with him once his father is deemed too ill to receive food. Throughout his description of his father’s final illness, Eliezer painstakingly portrays the tender affection with which he dutifully cares for him. His motivation in doing so seems to be a lingering sense of guilt and regret about the ambivalence that deeply divided him. His father mouths his son’s name with his last word, after receiving his death blow, but it is a summons that Eliezer does not answer. He has no tears to weep for him, and the Eliezer that his father once knew is now dead, too.

The death of his father is the definitive moment in Eliezer’s narrative; after his father dies, Eliezer has no further interest in life. As he says in the concluding chapter, “I have nothing to say of my life during this period. It no longer mattered. After my father’s death, nothing could touch me any more” (114). He only wants to eat, without thinking anymore of his family. The narrative of Night is structured around the relationship of Eliezer and his father struggling to survive together at Auschwitz, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. Once that relationship is severed, the raison d’etre of the story ends, and the narrative comes to a rather sudden conclusion.

Eliezer’s account of the liberation of Buchenwald by the Americans is brief. He alludes to the armed resistance within the camp that attacks the SS guards without explaining where they come from. This may be ascribed to the apathy and idleness affecting him after his father’s death. He also notes that once liberated, the prisoners surprisingly have no interest in revenge. The immensity of the experience they have endured at the hands of the Nazis, the total and brutal scope of their victimization and dehumanization, renders thoughts of revenge useless and inadequate as a means to recover what they have lost. As he looks into the mirror at the hospital where he is recovering from food poisoning, Eliezer sees a corpse staring back at him. He has been transformed into a creature living a posthumous existence, and his liberated life remains haunted by a living death, the night from which he can never escape.