Dicton and Disaster

Night – the breaking point of our sanity, the inevitable transformation from day to day, enveloping dusk, creating dawn – leaving the hopeless citizens of Sighet to question their values, their moral instincts, as God’s everlasting grace, no longer remains an essential building block of Jewish culture. As the Nazi’s continue to progress, working their way through Jewish communities, capturing, destroying, and exiling innocent victims as they go, author Elie Wiesel of the novel Night, paints pictures in the mind of the reader with beautiful imagery and crafted diction; in order to give a better understanding of the emotional journey the Jew’s encountered, when taken into the authoritative arms of the Germans.

Covering up their inhumane intentions, the German’s masked their sins with false accounts of sincerity. Wiesel brings attention particularly to an instance regarding a woman’s encounter with a German soldier on the home front. After moving in with the woman and her family, Wiesel states that he had heard, “he was a charming man, calm, likeable, and polite” (10). Three days after moving in, the soldier had purchased a box of chocolates for the Jewish woman, presenting himself as a respectable human being, without evil ever taking capacity in his twisted mind. Only days later, “two ghettos were created in Sighet” (11). The Jew’s took this as a grain of salt. Maybe this was for the better? After all they were still all together weren’t they? It wasn’t until the Germans took severe action, placing Jew’s in cattle cars as if they were the animals themselves, taking them to an unknown place where they all were to face their final solution – death. Throughout this section of the novel, regarding the departure from their homes and their arrival at Auschwitz, Wiesel’s simple, yet powerful diction helps to illustrate the reactions of the people and their surroundings. Their greeting was not from those who worked there, but rather “the smell of burning flesh” (28). The burning, the killing, the mass murder of their own kind, represents the descent to savagery the Nazi party must have endured in order to find pleasure in such inhumane anguish.