How Night Relates to Current Issues

In the book, “Night”, Elie Wiesel writes about his memories of his life as a young Jewish boy from Sighet in which he survives four death camps. In the first camp, Auschwitz, his Mother and sister are murdered. He struggles with his father through many near death experiences and they learn to take care of one another. However, just before being rescued, his father dies. “Night”, in some ways, is not anything like our lives today. On the other hand, I believe this book is relevant to our life today with respect to racism, question of faith and repression. Unfortunately, these issues continue to describe our present world.

In the book, “Night”, Jews are instructed not to shop, attend synagogue or to leave the house only because of their religion. They had to wear yellow stars to identify themselves as Jewish. Even today, many people treat others differently only because of color, sexual preference or religion. For some groups, no stars are needed because their skin is a different color or their ethnicity has strong traits such as slanted eyes. There is no way to hide the differences. There are those who believe that only white, “American” people belong here. However, Americans are a melting pot of the whole world. Some things may have changed over the years like allowing blacks to use the same areas as whites, but other prejudice acts still exist. We hear of hate crimes to gays and blacks in which they are beaten or vandalized. Many do not like Mexicans and consider all Spanish

to be of Mexican heritage. They feel Mexicans are only here to