Last week, we talked about between Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian immigrants and the Japanese during the World War II. I changed my mind because for saving U.S.A. My opinion is that Japansese Americans should have gone relocation camps in order to be safe for America.
If U.S goverment didn't make relocation capms, Japanese Americans reveled U.S. so that U.S. would be damaged by Japanese American.

Why?

-The Japanese American posed a threat as enemy agents, Many of them live around aircraft plants, ports, dams, bridges, power stations, and other strategic points.

-Widespread distust of the Japannese population lowered pubic morale on the West Coast. Evacuation would be safe.

-Loyalty of Japanese Americans to the U.s was doubtful. There was no way to distinguish loyal U.S. citizens from those whose first loyalty was to Japan. All Americans of Japanese ancestry were considered citizens of Japan by the Japanese by the Japanese goverment. some had sent their children to Japan for schooling. As a group, the Japanses in the not blended in to the mainstrem of American life.

-In total war, constitutional rights have to give way to drastic measures.

Now, the war is finished so that we have to get peace each other. We have never to fight each other again for the world peace.

Japanese History and Relocation
Simply, I found waht Japanese history about tasting human body during World War II.

Unit 731
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Body disposal at Unit 731
Unit 731 was a secret military medical unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that researched biological warfare and other topics through human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War(1937-1945) and World War II era. For information on its origin see Kempeitai Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory.
The unit was disguised as a water purification unit. It was based in Pingfan, near the city of Harbin in northeastern China, the region which was then part of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Various Eastern and Western sources estimate anywhere from 3,000 to 200,000 Chinese, Korean, Allied civilians and POWs were directly or indirectly killed by Unit 731's experiments.
There were other units besides Unit 731, which serves as a general term in describing the Japanese biological warfare program. Other units include Unit 543 (Hailar), Unit 773 (Songo unit), Unit 100 (Changchun), Unit 1644 (Nanjing), Unit 1855 (Beijing), Unit 8604 (Guangzhou), Unit 200 (Manchuria):and Unit 9420 (Singapore). The acts of Unit 731 are one of many major war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army from the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 to the end of World War II in 1945.
After these laboratories were destroyed by the Japanese to hide their activities, many of the scientists involved went on to prominent careers in politics, academia and business. The United States granted amnesty, allowing these scientists to go unprosecuted in exchange for their experimentation data.

Formation
In 1932, Shiro Ishii and his men built the Zhongma Fortress, a prison on the outskirts of Harbin. In 1935 a jailbreak forced Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. Ishii moved closer to Harbin at Pingfan to set up a new facility.

Activities
A special project code-named Maruta used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and were sometimes known as "logs" (maruta 丸太). This term originated as a joke from the fact that the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. It demonstrates the feeling of the scientists that killing a prisoner was the same as cutting down a tree. The test subjects ranged from infants, to old people, to pregnant women along with the baby. Many experiments were performed without the use of anesthetics because it was believed that it might affect the results.

Vivisection
-Vivisections were performed on prisoners infected with various diseases; scientists would remove organs to study the effects of the disease on the human body.

-Prisoners were amputated limb by limb to study blood loss.

-Arms were cut off and reattached to opposite sides.

-Limbs were frozen and sawed off.

-Stomachs were surgically removed and the esophagus was reattached to the intestines.
Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, et cetera were taken out.

-Vivisection of a pregnant woman (impregnated by one of the doctors) and the fetus.

Weapons testing
-Grenade tests used human targets at various distances and positions.

-Flame throwers were tested on humans.

-Bombs were tested on humans tied to stakes at various positions.


Other experiments
-Human subjects were deprived of food and water to study the effects and duration before death.

-Prisoners were placed into highly pressurized chambers until they died.

-Frostbite experiments were conducted on prisoners to determine how long humans can survive when exposed to extreme temperatures.

-Temperature experiments were performed to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and survival rate.

-Prisoners were placed into centrifuges and spun until they died.

-Animal blood was injected into humans.

-Prisoners were bombarded with lethal doses of x-ray radiation.

-Gas chambers tested chemical weapons on prisoners.

-Air bubbles were injected into prisoners' bloodstreams to simulate a stroke.

-Sea water was injected into prisoners to determine if it could be substituted for saline.

Biological warfare
Japanese scientists tested the plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases on prisoners. Their research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb to spread the bubonic plague. Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, proposed by Ishii Shiro in 1938. This enabled Japanese soldiers to launch multiple biological attacks by infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrying fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera and other deadly pathogens. Infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by planes in areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces.


Members
Lieutenant-General Shiro Ishii
Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito
Dr. Masaji Kitano
Yoshio Shinozuka


Divisions
Unit 731 was divided into eight divisions.

Division 1: Research on bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid, tuberculosis on live subjects. For this purpose a prison was constructed to contain around three to four hundred people.


Division 2: Research for biological weapons used on the field, in particular the production of devices to spread germs and parasites.

Division 3: Production of shells containing biological agents. Stationed in Harbin.

Division 4: Production of other miscellaneous agents.

Division 5: Training of personnel.

Division 6-8: Equipment, medical, and administrative units.


Facilities

One of the buildings is open to tourists
The Unit 731 complex covered six square kilometers and consisted of more than 150 buildings. The facilities were very well designed making it hard to destroy them. Some of Unit 731's satellite facilities still remain and are open to tourists.
The complex contained various production facilities. It had around 4,500 containers for raising fleas, six giant cauldrons to produce various chemicals, and around 1,800 containers to produce biological agents. Approximately 30 kg of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in several days.
Tens of tons of these biological weapons (and some chemical) were stored in various places in northeastern China throughout the war. The Japanese attempted to destroy every last shred of evidence of the facilities after disbanding; however, this was not successful as evidence has occasionally harmed civilians even very recently. In particular, in August 2003, 29 people were hospitalized after a construction crew in Heilongjiang inadvertently dug up chemical shells that had been buried deep in the soil more than fifty years ago.

Disbanding and the end of World War II

Information sign at the site today
Ishii had wanted to use biological weapons in the Pacific conflict since May 1944, but his attempts were repeatedly foiled by poor planning and Allied intervention. When it was clear that the war would soon end, Ishii ordered the destruction of the facilities, and told his men "to take the secret to the grave." His Japanese troops blew the compound up in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their experimentation. They also purposely released thousands of plague-infected rodents, and other animals, such as horses, infected with diseases communicable to humans. Chemicals were dumped into rivers or buried. Some of these chemicals continue to pollute China today.
After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation. At the end of the war however, he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological weapons. The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the allies had never publicly conducted this type of human experimentation, due to potential political fallout. Also, the U.S. did not want any other nation, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons.
Only one reference to Japanese experimentation with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians was made at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in August 1946 by David Sutton, the assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. Japanese defense counselor, Michael Levin, argued the claim was vague and uncorroborated, and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was likely aware of Unit 731 activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental.
Although silent on the issue at the Tokyo trials, the Soviet Union relentlessly pursued the case and prosecuted several officials from the unit at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials. Although many Russians were also tortured and experimented upon at Unit 731, along with Mongolians and Koreans, Russia's motivation for the Khabarovsk trial is believed to have been political in nature. In fact, the Soviet Union let off the criminals with a relatively light sentence, some believe after negotiating its own acquisition of the data.
Many former members of Unit 731 became part of the Japanese medical establishment. Dr Masaji Kitano led Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others headed U.S.-backed medical schools or worked for the Japanese health ministry.
[edit]

Politicization of history
Unit 731 activities are denied by right-wing nationalist Japanese historians, who say they are fabrications by Chinese propaganda. Left-wing organizations have published histories of Unit 731 that detail the cover-up by the U.S. government (in exchange for the data). As with many WWII topics (and the subsequent political debate) references to Unit 731 are omitted from many Japanese history textbooks. Some see this as evidence that, in modern Japan, revisionist history is part of the mainstream, which contributes to the perception that Japan has yet to accept full responsibility for the crimes of its past.
In late 1982, the Government of the People's Republic of China opened the Unit 731 War Crime Exhibition Museum in Harbin.
In 1997, 180 Chinese, either victims or the family of victims of Unit 731, sued the Japanese government for a full disclosure, apology and compensation.
In August 2002, the Tokyo District Court acknowledged the existence of Unit 731 and its biological warfare activities, but ruled that all compensation issues were settled by the Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China of September 29, 1972. However that document only mentions the renunciation of reparations claims by the Chinese Government, not private individuals.
In 2000, the United States Congress passed the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act to declassify most classified U.S. Government records about war criminals and crimes committed by the Japanese during World War II. As of 2003, this will be done through the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG). Nearly all of the remaining classified data is believed to relate to post-1945 experiments conducted jointly between Japanese and U.S. scientists.
In 2005, Professor Keiichi Tsuneishi of Kanagawa University found, in the U.S. National Archives, declassified documents showing that the U.S. Government had purchased information gleaned from Unit 731's experiments. The officers in charge of Unit 731 were persuaded to provide the results with money, gifts, entertainment and a waiver of war crimes charges. The motivation for the purchase was the enhancement of the U.S.'s own biological warfare program, itself a part of the arms race with the Soviet Union.

Cultural depictions and representations
Japanese author Morimura Seiichi published the book The Devil's Gluttony (悪魔の飽食) in 1981, followed by The Devil's Gluttony - A Sequel in 1983, which were the first Japanese language publications to reveal the dark history of Unit 731.
The Chinese movie Men Behind The Sun is a film about the atrocities committed by Unit 731.
Two episodes of the television show The X-Files weave Unit 731 into the series' complex alien abduction/government conspiracy mythology. In the episodes "Nisei" and "731", Japanese scientists who were given amnesty in the U.S. after World War II are said to be continuing their work in secret, experimenting with creating an alien-human hybrid, possibly as a weapon to be immune to biological weapons. The name of the doctor in charge of the secret Japanese group of former Unit 731 doctors, Takeo Ishimaru, and his alias, Shiro Zama, is an amalgamation of the name of the real head of Unit 731, Dr. Shiro Ishii.
The British comics writer Warren Ellis wrote a John Constantine story ("Setting Sun," Hellblazer #142, DC Comics) about a fictionalized version of one of the doctors who performed the experiments, and his guilt-ridden desire to have done to him what he did to others.
Japanese director Minoru Matsui's 2001 documentary Japanese Devils (Japanese: Riben Guizi) was composed largely of interviews with 14 members of Unit 731 who had been taken prisoner by China and later released.

See also
Changde chemical weapon attack
Japanese war crimes
Manila Massacre
Nanking Massacre
Kaimingye germ weapon attack
Second Sino-Japanese War
Sook Ching Massacre
Unit 100


External links
"History of Japan's biological weapons program". In "Federation of American Scientists". 2000-04-16.
Green, Shane. "The Asian Auschwitz of Unit 731". In The Age. 2002-08-29.
"Biochemical Warfare - Unit 731". In "Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War (APTSJW)". No date.
"Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG)". In "National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)". No date.
The trial of Unit 731 By Russell Working, The Japan Times
Unit 731
Japan's sins of the past - from The Guardian.
IWG archives
US paid for Japanese human germ warfare data - from Australian Broadcasting Corportation News Online. 2005-08-15
Unit 731
Ex-Japanese Soldier Deemed War Criminal


References
Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Charles E Tuttle Co., 1996. ISBN 4900737399
Williams, Peter. Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, Free Press, 1989. ISBN 0029353017
Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, Routledge, 1994. ISBN 0415091055 ISBN 0415932149
Endicott, Stephen and Edward Hagerman. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1999. ISBN 0253334721
Handelman, Stephen and Ken Alibek. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It, Random House, 1999. ISBN 0375502319 ISBN 0385334966
Harris, Robert and Jeremy Paxman. A Higher Form of Killing : The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Random House, 2002. ISBN 0812966538
Barnaby, Wendy. The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare, Frog Ltd, 1999. ISBN 1883319854 ISBN 0756756987 ISBN 0826412580 ISBN 082641415X
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731"
Categories: Second Sino-Japanese War World War II crimes Biological warfare Imperial Japanese Army Military history of Japan during World War II Japanese war crimes


Japanese people attacked Pearl Hurbor because they wanted to contral whole world. It was their greed. After numerous of U.S. militeries were killed by Japanese people, so that U.S. was very angry than they bomed Hiroshima in Japan so that Japanese stoped killing weak people and attacking U.S. They surrendered themselves and then went to back to Japan. The Japanese people had had a problem during the WWII, somepeople remained in U.S. The people who were Japanses married with U.S citizen in U.S.A. The Japanses poeple had suffered in U.S.A. Many U.S. citizen had hated the Japanese People because of WWII. For example, when Japanese people walk on the street, U.S. citizen ignored and uttered curses to the Japeneses. I think they didn't need that they were of Japanese descent, and the U.S. fought in the war with Japan.There was anti-Japanese hysteria in America. They didn't kill anybody but if person who was a U.S.A. spy, it is problem. So American people should be treated Japenese American like U.S citizen nomally rather than the fact that Americans just ignored Japanese American. It is U.S. gorverment's deal so nobody thought about treating discreamination without any justifiable reason.

WAR IS NECESSART?

I had read Night, I thought alot of things. It was death and life, fear of war, and courage infront of death. And that I interviewed a soldier who had participated in the Korea War was U.S. militery. He is 75 years old. I heard his story then my feeling was moved of them. I understood about value of life and fear of war from book and his story. When I listen to when he fought in the Korea War, it was so cruel and fear. So that I have felt war is not necessary because wars make people live misurable. Soldiers's familes and the civilians who had lived in the war can live unhappily only in that they miss thier own families and remember the fear in the war. If one soldier die, his family, more than 2 people, surffer by missing him forever until they die. So in the war, many people were killed, wounded or seperated in wars that more than 2 times of soldiers and civilians' families have missed or taken care of them since any war. I believe that people should live in freedom. I have learned a lot.

DURING VACATION

During the vacation, I had done my homwork. My homework was interviwing with people who had joined or lived in war. Then I worte a essay and prepared a presentation about the interview. I met Mr. Robert E. who was a U.S. militery. I interviewd with him and his wife. I listened to their stories. It was very interesting. After I finished the interview, I felt a lot of things. I have changed my mind since the vacation. I awake of how to live good life during alive. I believe that people should live to do their best in their own lives because life is very important and at our opposite side in the earth, a lot of people live hungerily, misurably, and painfully. people who can work and study in good condition try to not say about "I am not happy or I can't do anything." If they say like that they have a gulity from hungy people.

MEETING NEW FRIENDS

Yesterday I met classmates at clip programe inBronx. We had a good time for breakfast and introdusing each other. I was excited of new friends. After we went to the Metropolitan Museum. We divided a group of each four people. My teacher gave us about we go to mornden art section, choosing what we want, then dscribing an art. My group was Jackia, Jennifer, Antonia, and me.We also divided two people each. I had a partner who was Jennifer. Jennifer and I chose a patagoraphy desk. Then we discrived avbout that. We answered a paper which has question about that. We met Jackia and Antonia. Jennifer and I saw a picture which was their chosen picture. We saw the pinture. I wrote information about the picture. We parted.
I was a great day because I made new friends. They are so nice and kind. I just felt they were fashionable. We shared our phone numbers and email address each other. I like them.

"NIGHT"




I have read "Night Elie Wiesel" My teacher gave us a question about when I was under unfavorable circumstances like Elie, how I think in God.
My uncle is a pastor, and my grandmother and brother are strong christians. Although my family are strong christians, I do not have strong belief. I rarely went to a church. I think God is in each person own heart, yet God is not in the universe, whatever. Why? because God is their own faith, belief. People have their own insistance and philosophies each other, so they believe themselves by leading their own belief in God. Everybody are different thinkings in their own faith although they believe the same God. A lot of religions and a lot of Gods are exstenced by people in the world. Only things is that they are popular religions or not. I guess many reilgions have been teaching to know good from bad and right from wrong. For example, Killing, stealing, and selfish are bad; it is like an evil, etc...... The good are helps each other, peace, calm, and happy etc. It is my opinion so I cant say what is their good from bad. I can say Belief is their own right from wrong, opinons and lives; how to live good way? how to live right way? So I beileve myself by my own right way for living and good my future.

If I was in Elie's situation, I belived God forever due to the fact that God is not the problem in his situation in spite of just Elie's thinking or emotion. I understood the happen was a too cruel circumstance and perilous plight. I must think like Elie but I tried to understand first why I suffered this circumstance. If I lost my belief in God, I was going to have more hard time. I was comfort by God in the happen.

===================================================================

Night (book)
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Night
Night is an autobiographical novella by Elie Wiesel based on his experience, as a young Jew, of being deported from the village of Sighet in Transylvania to the German death camp at Auschwitz, and later to the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Wiesel was 17 years old when Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945 by the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army. Having lost his faith in God and humanity, he kept his story to himself for ten years, and contemplated suicide, but during a meeting in Paris in May 1955, François Mauriac, the French novelist and Nobel laureate, persuaded Wiesel to start writing. Forty-five years later, Night ranks alongside Primo Levi's If This is a Man and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature, and possibly its most powerful description of humiliation and despair.
The interlocking themes of Night are what Wiesel saw as the death of God and mankind in the concentration camps, reflected in the inversion of the father-child relationship as Wiesel's father declines to a helpless state and the teenager becomes his increasingly resentful caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." (101)
Wiesel employs a sparse and fragmented narrative structure, with frequent shifts in point of view, a fusing of fact and fiction, lending the structure of Jewish folklore to that of the modern novel. (Fine 1982:7) "It is the style of the chroniclers of the ghettos," writes Wiesel, "where everything had to be said swiftly, with one breath. You never knew when the enemy might kick in the door, sweeping us away into nothingness." (Wiesel 1996:321)
In telling his story, Wiesel sees himself as seeking redemption, reflecting the importance Judaism attaches to the power of the word. (Fine 1982:29) "In Night, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end — man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with Night. (Wiesel, in Reichek 1976)

Biography of Elie Wiesel (1928-)
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania on September 30, 1928. He had two older sisters and a younger sister named Tzipora. The town of Sighet is located in present-day Romania, although historically the area has been claimed by the people of both Hungary and Romania. Elie (short for Eliezer) grew up speaking Yiddish at home, and Hungarian, Romanian, and German outside. He also learned classical Hebrew at school. Elie's mother's family was part of the Hasidic sect of Judaism, and Elie loved the mysticism and folk tales of the sect as a child. He devoted the early years of his life to religious studies although his father encouraged him to study modern Hebrew and secular subjects also.
During the early years of World War II, Sighet remained relatively unaffected by the war. Although Sighet became controlled by the Hungarians instead of the Romanians, the Jews in Sighet believed that they would be safe from the persecution that Jews in Germany and Poland were suffering. In 1944, however, Elie and all the other Jews in the town were deported to concentration camps in Poland. Elie and his father were taken to Auschwitz, where they became separated from Elie's mother and younger sister Tzipora. Elie, who was fifteen at the time, never saw them again.
During the following year, Elie was moved to the concentration camps at Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. He managed to stay with his father the entire time until his father's death from dysentery, starvation, exposure, and exhaustion at Buchenwald. Finally, in April 1945, Elie was liberated from Buchenwald by the United States Third Army.
After the war, Elie learned that his mother and younger sister had died in the gas chambers, but that his two older sisters had survived. Elie lived in a French orphanage for a few years and in 1948 began to study literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris. He supported himself as a choirmaster and teacher of Hebrew, and he became a journalist, writing for the French newspaper L'Arche and the Israeli Yediot Ahronot. Elie had vowed never to write about his Holocaust experiences, but in 1955, after meeting the French Catholic novelist and Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac, he decided to write And the World Remained Silent, a 900-page volume. The book was originally written in Yiddish and published in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After two years, it appeared again in a compressed, 127-page French version called La Nuit (Night).
In 1956 Elie Wiesel was hit by a taxicab in New York and confined to a wheel chair for almost a year. He applied for American citizenship and after recovering from his injuries, continued to live in New York as a feature writer for a Yiddish-language newspaper called the Jewish Daily Forward. He wrote an additional 35 works in French dealing primarily with Judaism and the Holocaust. His novels include L'Aube (Dawn) and Le Jour (The Accident), which are semi-autobiographical works dealing with Holocaust survivors. In La Ville de la Chance (The Town Beyond the Wall ), Wiesel imagines returning to his home town, which he does only after the novel is published.
Wiesel's other novels include The Gates of the Forest, The Oath, The Testament, and The Fifth Son. He has written plays, including Zalmen, or the Madness of God and The Trial of God, and his essays and short stories are collected in the volumes Legends of Our Time, One Generation After, and A Jew Today. In addition, he has written collections of Hasidic tales and Biblical stories, and the English translation of his memoirs was published in 1995 as All Rivers Run to the Sea. Wiesel continues to write in French, but his wife Marion, who he married in 1969 and who also survived the concentration camps, collaborates with him his books' English translations. Wiesel's books on the Holocaust have helped win him an international reputation.
Wiesel became politically involved after learning about the persecution of Soviet Jews in the USSR. He first traveled to the USSR in 1965 and described the situation he observed in the volume The Jews of Silence. He has continued to plead on the behalf of oppressed peoples in the Soviet Union, South Africa, Vietnam, Biafra, and Bangladesh.
Elie Wiesel has lectured at colleges around the country and has been Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University since 1976. In 1978 he was appointed Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by President Jimmy Carter, and in 1985 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement by President Ronald Reagan. In 1986 Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for Peace. Currently, Elie Wiesel lives in New York City with his wife and son Elisha.

Night (book)
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The Jews of Sighet

Location of Sighet
Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), a village in the Carpathian mountains in northern Transylvania, annexed by Hungary in 1940, and now part of Romania.
With his father Shlomo, his mother Sarah, and his three sisters, Hilda, Beatrice, and Tzipora, Wiesel lived as part of a close-knit community of between 10,000 and 20,000 Jews. When Germany invaded Hungary at midnight on March 18, 1944, few believed they were in danger, and Night opens with Moshe the Beadle, the caretaker in Wiesel's synagogue and the town's humblest resident, "awkward as a clown" but much loved, warning his neighbors in vain to save themselves.
As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe in May and June that year, Wiesel and his family, along with 15,000 other Jews from Sighet, and 18,000 from neighboring villages, were being deported by the Germans to Auschwitz (Fine 1982:5). Sarah and Tzipora were immediately sent to the gas chambers, while Hilda and Beatrice managed to survive, separated from the rest of the family.
Wiesel and his father stayed together until his father died in Buchenwald, just weeks before the Allies arrived to liberate them.
[edit]

Wiesel's story as told in Night
[edit]

Moshe the Beadle

Elie Wiesel, at age 15, just before being deported to Auschwitz. "Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?"
The story of Night is told by the narrator Eliezer, a studious and deeply pious Orthodox Jewish teenager, who studied the Talmud by day and "at night ... ran to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple" (14). In the synagogue, Moshe the Beadle and Eliezer talk about the Kabbalah and the mysteries of the universe, Moshe teaching him that "man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him." Night returns repeatedly to this theme of a spiritual faith sustained, not by answers, but by questions.
In 1942, the Hungarian government ruled that Jews unable to show they were citizens would be expelled; Moshe is therefore crammed onto a cattle train and taken to Poland. Somehow he manages to escape, miraculously saved by God, he believes, in order that he in turn might save the Jews of Sighet. He hurries back to the village, a changed man, to tell what he calls "the story of my own death (17).

The house where Wiesel was raised. [1]
There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or the cabbala, but only of what he had seen. People refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to him. (4)
Moshe goes from one Jewish household to the next telling his story. "Jews, listen to me. It's all I ask of you. I don't want money or pity. Only listen to me" (17). The cattle train crossed the border into Poland, he tells them, where it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were singled out, transferred to lorries, and driven to the forest in Galicia, near Kolomaye, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole, present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. Moshe tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen.
He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has! they said. Or even: Poor fellow. He's gone mad.And as for Moshe, he wept. (4-5)
Over the next 18 months, restrictions on Jews gradually increase. No valuables are to be kept in Jewish homes, they are not allowed to go into restaurants, attend the synagogue, go out after six in the evening, and must wear the yellow star. Eliezer's father makes light of it: "The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it ... (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)" In mid-April 1944, they are instructed not to leave their homes, except for one hour in the afternoon to shop. Over the next ten days, all Jews are transferred to one of two ghettos, which are jointly run like a small town, each with its own council or Judenrat carrying out the instructions of the main Jewish Council, which in turn receives orders from the Hungarian or German authorities. But life there is good.

The main Sighet ghetto after the deportation of the Jews. "The last transport left the station on a Sunday morning. ... It was less than three weeks before the Allies' invasion of Normandy. Why did we allow ourselves to be taken? We could have fled, hidden ourselves in the mountains or in the villages. The ghetto was not very well guarded: A mass escape would have had every chance of success.But we did not know." [2]
The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department – a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers ...It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto – it was illusion. (9-10)
Between May 16 and June 27, 1944, 131,641 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania to Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the same period (May 15–July 9), a total of 438,000 Jews on 147 trains were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, where four out of five were sent directly to the gas chambers. Eliezer watches his friends and neighbors march through the streets. [5]
They began their journey without a backward glance at the abandoned streets, the dead, empty houses, the gardens, the tombstones ... Here came the Rabbi, his back bent, his face shaved ... His mere presence among the deportees added a touch of unreality to the scene. It was like a page torn from some story book ... One by one they passed in front of me, teachers, friends, others, all those I had been afraid of, all those I once could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood, cringing like beaten dogs. (14-15)
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Auschwitz

Eliezer arrives with his parents and sisters in Poland at Auschwitz-Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II, the death camp, one of three main camps and 40 subcamps in the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, erected by the Germans on the grounds of an abandoned Polish army barracks. Between 1940 and 1945, around 1.1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles, 18,000 Roma, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war were killed there. [6]

"Selection" of Jews from Hungary at Auschwitz II-Birkenau at the end of May/beginning of June 1944. The photograph was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. [3]
Men and women are separated on arrival; Eliezer and Shlomo to the left; Sarah, Hilda, Beatrice, and Tzipora to the right. He would learn years later that, after "selection," Sarah and Tzipora had been sent to the gas chamber.
For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother's hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister's fair hair ... and I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. (27)
The rest of the novella describes Eliezer's initial, desperate efforts not to be parted from his father, not even to lose sight of him; his grief and shame at witnessing his father's decline into helplessness; and as their relationship changes and the young man becomes the older man's caregiver, his resentment and then his guilt, because he fears that his sick father's existence threatens his own. The stronger his instinct for physical survival becomes, the weaker grow the bonds that tie him to other people. A Kapo tells him: "Here, there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.”

Members of the Sonderkommando burn corpses in the firepits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photographer unknown, 1944. Courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, Poland. [4]
His loss of faith in human relationships is mirrored in his loss of faith in God, who remains silent. His faith had been a simple one: God was good, and He was everywhere, therefore the world was good. During that first night, he and his father wait in line to be thrown into a firepit. He watches a lorry draw up beside the pit and deliver its load of children into the fire. While his father recites the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead — "I do not know whether it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves," (31) — Wiesel considers throwing himself against the electric fence. At just that moment, he and his father are ordered instead to go to their barracks. But "the student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me" (35).
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. (32)
God is not lost to him entirely. Later, during the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone in the crowd ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony, "struggling between life and death." Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes still clear, and weeps.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now?And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows. 61-2)
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Death march
In or around August 1944, Eliezer and Shlomo are transferred from Auschwitz II to Auschwitz III, the work camp at Buna-Monowitz, their lives reduced to the avoidance of violence and the constant search for food. "Bread, soup—these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach." The only time they experience joy is when the Americans bomb the camp. "[W]e were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life."

In January 1945, as the Soviet army approached to liberate Auschwitz, the Germans forced 60,000 inmates on what became known as the death marches, during which 15,000 people died, most of them Jews. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
In January 1945, with the Soviet army approaching, the Germans decide to flee the camp, taking around 60,000 inmates, mostly Jews, to camps in Germany, on what becomes known as the death marches, shooting anyone too weak to continue. Eliezer and Shlomo march to Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland) to be put on a freight train to Buchenwald, one of Germany's largest concentration camps, located in Germany itself, near Weimar, the birthplace of Goethe.
An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering.Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots. (81)
Taking rest in a shed after marching 50 miles, Rabbi Eliahou asks if anyone has seen his son. They had stuck together for three years, "always near each other, for suffering, for blows, for the ration of bread, for prayer," but the rabbi lost sight of him in the crowd and is now scratching through the snow looking for his son's corpse. I hadn't any strength left for running. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know. (86) Wiesel doesn't tell Rabbi Eliahou that the son had noticed the rabbi limping, and had run faster, letting the distance between them grow.
A terrible thought loomed up in my mind: he had wanted to get rid of his weak father! ... [He] had sought this separation in order to get rid of the burden, to free himself from an encumbrance ... And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done. (87)
The inmates march as far as Gliewitz, where they spend two days and nights locked inside cramped barracks without food, water, or heat, literally sleeping on top of one another, so that every morning the living wake up on top of corpses. Then there is more marching to the train station and onto a cattle wagon with no roof, and no room to sit or lie down until the other inmates make space by throwing the dead onto the tracks. They travel for ten days and nights, still with no food, and with only the snow falling on them for water. Of the 100 Jews in Wiesel's wagon, only 12 survive the journey.
I woke from my apathy just at the moment when two men came up to my father. I threw myself on top of his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hand, crying:Father! Father! Wake up. They're trying to throw you out of the carriage ...His body remained inert ...I set to work to slap him as hard as I could. After a moment, my father's eyelids moved slightly over his glazed eyes. He was breathing weakly.You see, I cried.The two men moved away. (94)
Passing through a German town, a workman throws a piece of bread from his bag into Wiesel's wagon. Years later, after the war, standing on a ship in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, Wiesel watched as an attractive, aristocratic woman from Paris threw money to some children who were diving into the water after it, two of them engaged in a life-and-death struggle for it, strangling one another. He remembered how the German workmen had watched the Jews in the wagon fight for the bread and he begged the woman to stop throwing the coins.
In the wagon where the bread had fallen, a real battle had broken out. Men threw themselves on top of each other, stamping on each other, tearing at each other, biting each other ... I noticed an old man dragging himself along on all fours ... he had a bit of bread under his shirt. With remarkable speed he drew it out and put it to his mouth. ... [A] shadow threw itself upon him. Felled to the ground, stunned with blows, the old man cried:Meir. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father ...The old man again whispered something, let out a rattle, and died amid the general indifference. His son searched him, took the bread, and began to devour it ... [but two] men had seen and hurled themselves upon him. When they withdrew, next to me were two corpses, side by side, the father and the son. (96)
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Buchenwald

Elie Wiesel at Buchenwald, second row, seventh from the left, taken on April 16, 1945, five days after the camp was liberated.
The Germans are waiting for the new inmates with loudhailers and orders to head straight for a hot bath. Wiesel is desperate for the heat of the water, but his father sinks into the snow, unable to move.
I could have wept with rage. Having lived through so much, suffered so much, could I leave my father to die now? Now, when we could have a good hot bath and lie down? ... He had become like a child, weak, timid, vulnerable ... I showed him the corpses all around him; they too had wanted to rest here ... I yelled against the wind ... I felt I was not arguing with him, but with death itself, with the death he had already chosen. (100)
An alert sounds, the camp lights goes out, and Wiesel, exhausted, follows the crowd to the barracks, leaving his father behind. He wakes at dawn on a wooden bunk, remembering that he has a father, and goes in search of him.
But at that same moment this thought came into my mind. Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever. (101)
His father is in another block, sick with dysentery. The other men in his bunk, a Frenchman and a Pole, attack him because he can no longer go outside to relieve himself, and Wiesel is unable to protect him. "Another wound to the heart, another hate, another reason for living lost." Begging for water one night from his bunk, where he has lain for a week, his father is beaten by an SS officer on the head with a truncheon for making too much noise. Wiesel lies in the bunk above and does nothing.

Shlomo Wiesel
I did not move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also receiving a blow. Then my father made a rattling noise and it was my name: Eliezer. (106)
In the morning, January 29, 1945, Eliezer finds another invalid lying in his father's place. The Kapos had come before dawn and taken him to the crematorium, possibly still alive.
His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond.
I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like — free at last! (106)
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Liberation
Eliezer's father missed his freedom by only a few weeks. The Soviets had liberated Auschwitz 11 days before he died, and the Americans were making their way towards Buchenwald. After Shlomo's death, Eliezer is transferred to the children's block where he stays with 600 others, dreaming of soup. On April 5, 1945, the inmates are called together to be told the camp was to be liquidated, and they were all being moved — another death march — then it would be blown up as part of the Germans' effort to hide what had happened there. On April 11, with 20,000 inmates still in the camp, a Jewish resistance movement of inmates attacks the remaining SS officers and takes control. At six o'clock that evening, the first American tank arrived, and behind it the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army. Eliezer is free.
I wanted to see myself in the mirror ... I had not seen myself since the ghetto.From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me. (109)
[edit]

Writing and publishing Night
From Buchenwald, Wiesel wanted to go to Palestine, but was prevented by British immigration restrictions (Fine 1982). Refusing to return to Sighet, he was sent instead to the Oeuvre au Secours aux Enfants (Children's Rescue Service) with 400 other orphans, first to Belgium, then to Normandy, where he learned that his his two older sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, had survived.
From 1947-50, he studied the Talmud, and later philosophy and literature, at the Sorbonne, attending lectures by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber. To supplement his $16 a week stipend, he taught Hebrew, and worked as a translator for the militant Yiddish weekly Zion in Kamf, which eased him into a career in journalism (Fine 1982). In 1948, at the age of 19, he was sent to Israel as a war correspondent by the French newspaper L'arche, and after the Sorbonne, he became chief foreign correspondent of the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronot.
For ten years, Wiesel kept his story to himself, refusing even to discuss it. With no faith in God, and none in humanity, he considered suicide. His outlook was summed up in Night by one of his neighbors in the barracks at Auschwitz: I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people. (p.77)
It was as a journalist, in 1955, that Wiesel met the French novelist and Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac. Wiesel wanted to interview Pierre Mendes-France, the French prime minister, and had heard that Mauriac was a friend of his, so on May 14, 1955, Wiesel went to ask Mauriac if he would arrange a meeting with Mendes-France.
The problem was that [Mauriac] was in love with Jesus. He was the most decent person I ever met in that field — as a writer, as a Catholic writer. Honest, sense of integrity, and he was in love with Jesus. He spoke only of Jesus. Whatever I would ask — Jesus. Finally, I said, "What about Mendès-France?" He said that Mendès-France, like Jesus, was suffering ...When he said Jesus again I couldn't take it, and for the only time in my life I was discourteous, which I regret to this day. I said, "Mr. Mauriac," we called him Maître, "ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it." I felt all of a sudden so embarrassed. I closed my notebook and went to the elevator. He ran after me. He pulled me back; he sat down in his chair, and I in mine, and he began weeping. I have rarely seen an old man weep like that, and I felt like such an idiot ... And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, "You know, maybe you should talk about it." [7]

Elie Wiesel
Wiesel handed in a 900-page manuscript in Yiddish called Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World was Silent). No one would publish it, either in France or in the U.S.; even with Mauriac's connections, publishers said that it was too morbid, and no one would read it. "Nobody wants to hear these stories," they told him. [8]
Eventually a small publisher in Buenos Aires, Argentina agreed to publish 300 pages in the original Yiddish as Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World was Silent); then in 1958, a small French publisher, Les Editions de Minuit, agreed to release a 127-page French translation retitled La Nuit, dedicated to Shlomo, Sarah, and Tzipora, with a preface by Mauriac.
Despite being published in two countries already, the same difficulty was encountered finding an American publisher. "Some thought the book too slender (American readers seemed to prefer fatter volumes)," writes Wiesel, "others too depressing (American readers seemed to prefer optimistic books). Some felt that its subject was too little known, others that it was too well known" (Wiesel 1996:325).
In 1960, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang — who "believed in literature as others believe in God" (Wiesel 1996:325) — agreed to pay a $100 pro-forma advance, and published it in the U.S. in September of that year as Night. It sold just 1,046 copies over the next 18 months, but attracted a certain amount of interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with other literary figures like Saul Bellow. "The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies," Wiesel said in an interview. “And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print." [9] The book is now available in 30 languages.
On January 16, 2006, Oprah Winfrey chose Night as her latest book club selection. One million extra paperback and 150,000 hardcover copies were printed carrying the "Oprah's Book Club" logo. [10] As of February 13, 2006, Night was no. 1 in the New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction. In addition, the 2006 edition has a new preface by the author and is a new translation.