Night Study Questions #1

1. How does Elie describe himself?

2. How important is religion to the way Elie defines his identity?

3. Why do you think they refuse to believe Moshe when he returns to Sighet?

4. Do you think people really believe that Moshe is lying to them? What is the difference between saying that someone is lying and saying hat you cannot believe what he or she is saying?

5. How do the Jews of Sighet react to the arrival of the Germans? The creation of the ghettos? Their own deportation? How do you account for these responses?

6. Why do you think Elie Wiesel begins Night with the story of Moshe the Beadle?

7. What lessons does the narrator seem to learn from Moshe's experiences in telling his own story?

8. Why does Madame Schächter scream? Why does she later become silent and withdrawn? How do people react the first time she screams? How do they respond when her screams continue? How would you respond?

9. Is she a madwoman? A prophet? Or a witness? What is the difference

between the three labels?

10. How is Madame Schächter like Moshe the Beadle? Does she, too,

know or sense something that others refuse to believe?

Night Study Questions #2

Night #2

1. Primo Levi, who was also at Auschwitz-Birkenau, wrote in his novella, Survival in Auschwitz:

It is not possible to sink lower than this: no human condition is

more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing

belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our

shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if

they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away

our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves

the strength to do so, to manage so that behind the name something

of us, of us, as we were, remains.

How are Levi's responses to his initiation into Auschwitz similar to

those of Elie? What differences seem most striking?

2. Elie describes two hangings. He tells the reader that he witnessed many others. Yet he chose to write only about these two. Why are these two hangings so important to him? How do they differ from the others?

3. Why do you think the Germans chose to hang a few prisoners in public at a time when they are murdering thousands each day in the crematoriums?

4. When the young boy is hanged, a prisoner asks, "Where is God now?" Elie thinks to himself, "He is hanging here on this gallows.." What does this statement mean? Is it a statement of despair? Anger? Or hope? Explain.

5. Wiesel said the following of inmates who tried "to show the killers they could be just like them":

No one has the right to judge them, especially not those who did not

experience Auschwitz or Buchenwald . The sages of our Tradition

state point-blank: "Do not judge your fellow-man until you stand in

his place." In other words, in the same situation, would I have acted

as he did? Sometimes doubt grips me. Suppose I had spent not

eleven months but eleven years in a concentration camp. Am I sure I

would have kept my hands clean? No, I am not, and no one can be.

How does Wiesel try to help us understand why it is so difficult to judge those who "tried to play the executioner's game"?

Wiesel writes that he prefers to remember "the kindness and compassion" of his fellow prisoners rather than those who were cruel or violent. Why does he view both as victims?

6. What is the meaning of the title, Night ?