Concentration Camps of "Night"

During World War II, the human race experienced one of the darkest moments of its history, known as the Holocaust. This mass genocide lasted from 1941 until 1945, during which the Nazis tortured and killed over 11 million people. One noteworthy account of survival of the Holocaust is Night, a first person story written by Elie Wiesel. The story tells his memoirs and events that he experienced during his time of persecution. The concentration camps that Elie experienced had such a vital impact on his life and the lives of others.

There were a number of known reasons for the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that there was a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, paralleled with an Aryan quest to cleanse the world. Also, the German’s loss of the First World War played a large part in their hatred for the Jews. Hitler felt that the Jews were an ‘internal enemy’ because they gave minimal support during World War I. The Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany, forcing them to accept full responsibility for the war (D’Silva).

In the book Night, Elie mentions five concentration camps. The first was Auschwitz, which was actually a complex of camps; including two others that he spent time in, Birkenau and Buna. These three were located in Poland. Another camp the Wiesels went to, Gleiwitz, was also located in Poland, bordering the modern-day country of the Czech Republic. Buchenwald was the only camp Elie went to that was not in Poland. It was in northern Germany, north of the city of Berlin. Overall, the majority of the camps were in Poland. There were twenty-eight main camps, with a combined total of almost two-hundred sub-camps (Ferree).

The Holocaust began in the autumn of 1939. The Nazis began to murder Jews in Poland, and then in the Soviet Union in 1941. In early July of that same year, Reinhard Heydrich was made responsible for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.” Later that year, on December 7, Hitler revealed that the mass murder...