Eliezer, Eli, narrates Night. He is a Jewish teenager who lives in Hungarian Transylvania. He studies the Torah and Cabbala but his studies are cut off when his teacher, Moshe the Beadle is deported. Moshe returns after several months and he talks about the Gestapo, who were the German secret police force, who came onto his train and made everybody go to the woods and then butchered them. Everybody believes that Moshe is crazy because of his story. Soon after the Nazis begin to occupy Hungary and soon after that Nazis take control of Eli's town and they are forced into ghettos. The people in the ghettos didn't think it could get any worse until they forced them onto cattle cars and shipped them off to concentration camps. They were taken to Birkenau which was the gateway to Auschwitz. When Eli and his family arrive at the camp, Eli and his dad are separated from his mom and sisters and they never see them again.
Jewish slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentrat...
English: Rows of bodies fill the yard of Lager Nor...
English: Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunge...When Eli and his dad arrive they were inspected to see if they were strong or weak. If they were strong they would live and be put to work but if they were weak they would be killed instantly. Luckily Eli and his dad passed and they moved on. Eli describes how the Jewish were stripped, shaved, disinfected and treated like animals with unimaginable cruelty. After all the preparation they are marched to Auschwitz. Eli and his dad work under slave labor conditions. Eli describes how in the camps you were subject to beatings and repeated humiliations for the littlest things. Eli is even forced to give his gold tooth away and when he refused it was taken out of his mouth with a rusty spoon.
Prisoners were even forced to watch their fellow prisoners...