Chapters 6–7 Summary

The march is horrifying. The Jews are whipped by the guards to make them walk faster. Anybody who stops will be shot by the SS. Some people fall and are trampled upon by the others. Eliezer moves with extreme difficulty, the thought of his father motivating him to walk. After running all night and covering more than 42 miles, the prisoners find themselves in a deserted village. Father and son keep awake all night, giving each other company, as falling asleep in that cold will be deadly. Rabbi Eliahou, a kind, old man, arrives at the shed where Eliezer and his father are resting, looking for his son. Eliezer lies to the rabbi that he has not seen his son but in reality, he had seen him abandon his father during the run, thinking he would not survive. Eliezer prays that he will never do to his father what Rabbi Eliahou’s son did.

They continue their march with SS officers escorting them on motorcycles, pushing them forward. They arrive at Gleiwitz, which is their new camp. The inmates rush inside, crushing each other in the process. Eliezer discovers that he is lying on top of Juliek, the musician who befriended him in Buna. He himself is also in danger of being crushed to death by the man lying on top of him. The sound of Juliek’s violin pierces the silence of the night, and the next day Eliezer discovers him dead, his violin crushed.

They stay in Gleiwitz for three days without food or water. Eliezer manages to save his father from being selected to the left during a selection.

The prisoners are herded into cattle cars. They are ordered to throw the dead out, and Shlomo, who is unconscious, is almost thrown out, mistaken for dead. Eliezer slaps his father vehemently, screams at him, and finally succeeds in waking him. The train travels for 10 days and nights. The conditions are inhuman. The Jews go hungry, living only on snow. When they pass German towns, the Germans throw bread at them, enjoying the Jews fight each other for the bread. An old man manages to grab a piece, but he is beaten to death by his own son for the bread, who, in turn, is attacked by the others. The train finally arrives at Buchenwald. Only 12 out of the 100 men who were in Eliezer’s train car have survived the trip.

Chapters 6–7 Analysis

These sections comprise two particularly tragic incidents—one where the rabbi is deserted by his own son in his attempt to survive and another where a nameless father is beaten up by his son for a piece of bread. These two incidents serve to underline how the atrocities of the Nazi camps reduced men into beasts, bringing out the most basic instinct where the only thing that mattered was one’s own life. The environment that the Jews sustained for days not only led to a loss of lives and loss of faith, it also splintered every cherished relationship they had with others. Eliezer is reduced never to hitting his father, but the reader is aware of the growing resentment he has against the old man. He unwillingly acknowledges that his father is reducing his chances of survival, a thought which also makes him ashamed. However, his father’s death makes him feel enormously guilty, which perhaps is the driving force for documenting his experience at the camp as a tribute to his father’s memory.

This section sees several tests of the father-son relationship, which allude to the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac, known in Hebrew as the Akedah. Critics have opined that the Night is a reversal of this story. While in the original Abraham sacrifices his son Isaac to God, in the end, the benevolent God saves Isaac and Abraham is rewarded for his piety and obedience. In Night, the world has been turned upside down where the son sacrifices his father in order to live. God is impotent now, or perhaps dead, and the sacrificial victim is not rescued at the last moment. There is no divine help, no poetic justice, no hope in this world, which only operates on one truth—the struggle to live at any cost whatsoever.

The Germans throwing bread at the Jews is an example of how people are capable of casual cruelty. It is not out of concern that they are throwing the food but more as curiosity, a form of entertainment to see what a bunch of famished animals trapped together would do to each other when enticed with bread. In a flash forward, Eliezer narrates another example of a Parisian woman whose “charity” results in two boys trying to kill each other for some coins. This incident illustrates that cruelty is inherent in people; necessarily, the Holocaust was not the only cruel time. In his later writings and speeches, Wiesel condemns apathy and indifference as the biggest factors that precipitated the complacency and inaction against the war crimes that the Third Reich perpetuated.

When Juliek plays the violin in the crowded barracks, it is a rare moment of beauty in the book. Throughout his narrative, Eliezer has mentioned how the barracks are always silent where silence reigns due to fear, terror, nightmares, and exhaustion. But Juliek’s music rents the air in a perfect moment of beauty and hope. Cheated of his life and happiness, Juliek puts everything that has been denied to him and infuses it into his music.