Night (book) - Background

Background

Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains in northern Transylvania, annexed by Hungary in 1940. With his father, Chlomo (also written Shlomo), his mother, Sarah, and his sisters—Hilda, Beatrice, and seven-year-old Tzipora—he lived in a close-knit community of between 10,000 and 20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Night accurately reflects events in Hungary at the time. Ellen Fine writes that anti-Jewish legislation was enacted between 1938 and 1944, but the period Wiesel discusses at the beginning of the book, 1942 and 1943, was nevertheless a relatively calm one for the Jewish population.

That changed at midnight on March 18, 1944, with the invasion by Nazi Germany and the installation of Döme Sztójay's puppet government. Adolf Eichmann, commander of the Nazi's Sondereinsatzkommando (Special Action Unit), arrived in Hungary to oversee the deportation of its Jews to Auschwitz. Between May 15 and July 7, 1944, 450,000 Hungarian Jews were sent there, around 12,000 every day, most of them gassed.

As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe in May and June that year, Wiesel and his family were being deported to Auschwitz, along with 15,000 Jews from Sighet and 18,000 from neighboring villages. Wiesel's mother and Tzipora were immediately sent to the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the rest of the family. Wiesel and his father managed to stay together, surviving hard labor and a death march to another concentration camp, Buchenwald, where Wiesel watched his father die just weeks before the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army arrived to liberate them.