Here are some interesting links that you can think about looking at.

The following link contains different questions and discussion topics about the book and a few paragraphs about Elie Wiesel.
http://www.holocaust-trc.org/night.htm

This next link contains famous quotes from the book. I liked re-reading some of these quotes.
http://classiclit.about.com/od/nighteliewiesel/a/night_quote.htm

This link is pretty interesting. A woman writes about her experience meeting Elie Wiesel
http://chitowncecilia.blogspot.com/2008/09/my-night-with-elie-weisel.html

This final link talks about evidence of the holocaust.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007147

Chapters 8 and 9

The beginning of chapter 8 scared me. The word "shower" made its way into the story and I was thinking that the Germans were lying to them. I thought that the Germans were really sending them into an oven, or into a gas room to be killed.Fortunately, I was wrong and they really were going to get showers.

Anyway, Elie's father goes off and sits in the snow and Elie tries to convince him to get up so he won't fall asleep. Fortunately, sirens go off and everyone is driven into the blocks. Everyone gets in their beds and falls asleep. The next morning, Elie forgets to look for his father. Elie finds him in the coffee line and Elie gives him coffee. His father was very sick.
Elie had to fight so much for his father's survival. He had to exchange soup for bread and things like that to care for his father. The last things his father said was Elie's own name after he was asking for water. After he died, the next morning, Elie didn't even cry because he was out of tears. He felt that he was now free and able to worry about himself.
After his father's death, all Elie could think about was food and nothing else. He no longer thought of his father or his mother, only food. Then he was transferred to the childrens block. The SS guard is late to roll call, and everyone knows that either something must have happened or something was going to happen. When an announcement goes on that all Jews must go to the assembly place, the children are on their way, but the prisoners tell them to go back to their blocks because the Germans were going to shoot them.
The camp resistance organization was not going to give up on the Jews and were going to try to prevent the liquidation. The next day at roll call, the leader or Buchenwald called for liquidation. Ten blocks of deportees would be evacuated each day and no more food would be handed out. The camp was to be blown up after the remaining 20,000 prisoners were evacuated. But it had to wait til the next day> no one ate for 6 days and the resistance eventually takes over the camp. Then, the 1st American tank arrived in Buchenwald.
After they were saved, Elie got food poisoning, but got better. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw the eyes of a corpse, an image has never left him.

Chapter 7

At the beginning of this chapter, The cattle car is stopped and is emptied of all dead Jews. Elie's father is almost thrown out with the other dead Jews, but he awakens at just the right moment. "Twenty corpses were thrown from our wagon." There were pieces of bread being thrown into the cattle cars for amusement of the German people. One piece landed in Elie's car and he figured that he wouldn't be strong enough to fight anyone off for the food. An old man had gotten it and hidden it under his shirt. He ate it, but his own son strangled him for the bread in his hand. He died because someone threw himself on him.
Near arrival, someone shouted out that everyone should stand up instead of sitting down and freezing. So they got up, but a cry from some sort of animal dieing came about and people started to imitate it. There were so many groans after another that Elie called it "contagious." That same night, they arrived in Buchenwald.

My reflection: In this chapter, food became more important then ever before. More people were fighting for food than they had earlier in the book. At the beginning of the chapter, I though Elie's dad had died and was going to be thrown out of the cattle car. I don't know what Elie would have done without his father because there was an instance where his father had to stop a man from strangling Elie in his sleep. Though Elie was thinking of abandoning his father earlier in the story, he realizes after all the have been through, he is not going to stop trying now.

Chapter 6

And so they ran. Thousands of Jews running in the bitter cold. An SS told them to pick up the pace and Elie thought of it in a positive way. "Why not? Moving fast made us a little warmer." While they were running, Elie was with a boy named Zalman, a boy from Poland. Elie tried to get him to keep going, but Zalman's stomach cramps were just too much to bear. Because of this, Zalman was trampled under the rush of the Jews..
This chapter was filled by little instances like the one about Zalman. Like Rabbi Eliahu, who, while the Jews were stopped from running, was searching for his son and Elie realized that his son ran ahead to get away from Rabbi Eliahu. Elie remembered this after he old Rabbi Eliahu that he hadn't seen his son. And also the part where Elie heard Juliek and was talking to him, but the next morning he saw him dead right in front of him.
There was another selection in Gleiwitz where Elie and his father did not make the cut. But because of all of the confusion, Elie and his father escaped to the side where they did make the cut. The Jews were then put into cattle cars once again and there were 100 Jews in each one.

My reflection: This section was another part of the book where Elie showed the sad stories of other people. It was not only his experiences that were horrifying; there were a lot of other people with equally terrible experiences. Elie learned quite a lot from the experiences he went through and looked upon. For example, the instance where the Rabbi was looking for his son. Elie told himself that he would not give up on his father like the Rabbi's son had nor would he let his father give up.

Chapter 5

This chapter started off with Elie questioning God. He questioned "Blessed be God's Name," because he didn't understand why God's name should be Blessed.  God had created all the bad things that happened during the holocaust: all the concentration camps, the killings and the killers. He had the idea that man is greater than God. Man praises God's name, yet they are punished. 

Later in the chapter, Elie talks about the selection: the separation of the healthy, strong prisoners and the unhealthy, weak prisoners. Any weak and unhealthy prisoners would be kept back at the camp when everyone else went back to work. (most of them knew that if they did not make the good end of the selection, they would be killed for sure.) Elie worried not only for his own sake, but for his father's too. Elie had a bad left arm, which he hid from those who observed him. His father was getting old and that is what worried him the most. If the observers wrote down your number, you were in trouble. Luckily, Elie's number was not written down. (he ran so fast they couldn't observe him) , but his father's number was written down (even though his father didn't notice.) Fortunately, there was a second selection and Elie's father passed.

Winter came and work was getting rough. Elie ended up getting surgery on his foot because it had gotten frost bite. Luckily, the surgery worked, but he had to wait 2 weeks to be able to walk like he did before. News came in that Hitler was going to anihilate all the Jews before the clock strikes twelve. It was a good thing the Russians were coming faster then they should have, or Elie and his father would not have survived another night. Elie made the decision to go with the rest of the Jews to the next camp instead of staying in the infirmary...

My reflection: I can see how Elie could not trust the God he once trusted. It was one bad event after another. All hope was withering away. However, the fact that he kept God up in his mind was a good thing. He tried to except God. He tried a lot, but he has given God too many chances and he was giving up.

Elie has been away from home for a long time. Something I noticed while reading was the line: " They put me in a bed with white sheets, I had forgotten that people slept in sheets." After reading that, I thought o myself, "How can you forget that people sleep in sheets?" Elie had been in a bed without sheets for a long time. It must have been so hard for him to get used to it (especially in the winter.) It is amazing he lived long enough to write a book about his experiences.

Chapter 4

Elie and his father were sent to Buna , another concentration camp, but they had to walk this time. Once again, Elie was able to work with his father. His father was very important to him and he may not have been able to withstand the concentration camp without him. A few days into work, Elie gets called for medical inspection. The dentist who was going to check him up is supposed to look for gold teeth and gold crowns in the prisoners' mouths and take them out to give to the Germans. Elie got his way out of it by saying he was not feeling well and the dentist said that Elie could come back another time. Elie wanted to keep his gold tooth in case he needed it in the future. The the dentist said that Elie should come back before he had to call him."All right, son. Come back to see me when you feel better. But don't wait for me to call you!"

Elie did come back a week later and he had the same excuse about being sick. The dentist was still happy that Elie came back before he had to call him. A few days later the dentist's office was shut down because he had been taking the gold teeth and making his own profits off of them.

Elie once again had to see his father get beaten. It was once again painful for Elie because he had to watch silently and could not do anything to stop it. Elie himself got into trouble, though. When Idek, Elie's Kapo, told everyone to get out of the camp, Elie was sneaking around looking for food. He then saw Idek with a Polish girl half naked and accidentally laughed. Idek, the next day, had Elie whipped in the back. Elie fainted a little and now knows not to do anything like that anymore.

My reflection: Elie has gotten punished for the first time in the concentration camp. He now feels the horridness of the Germans. I think that Elie was pretty smart as a kid. He knew that he needed his gold tooth to stay in his mouth until he really needed it. But the only problem with him is his curiousness. If he had ignored Idek and the girl, he would both had not been whipped and also had not made a not so good relation

ship even worse. One thing Ive noticed throughout the chapers is that Elie showed that the Germans have no reason for torturing some of

the Jews. Elie has seen it himself. He has seen his father beaten sometimes for no reason. The picture below shows the fact that many Germans in the Holocaust had no good reason for killing and torturing the Jews. It was all everyone's imaginative idea of the Jews that drove them to madness.

Chapter 3

The Jews get off their trains and are separated between men and women. Because of this, Elie and his father gets separated from his mother and sister. Then the narrator talks about how his dad and himself had to tell the people there that they are a different age. This way, the Germans will see them as more usefull and they will be less considered to be killed.

While on their way to the crematorium, Elie sees babies being burned in a fire. He showed in his writing how mad he was at God for this. He started getting very worried about his position and wanted to escape, but that thought eventually went out of his mind.

Elie's father was very important to him. In this chapter, his father was beaten for very useless reasons and Elie couldn't bear to watch, but he did anyway. He was so mad because of his inability to do anything to stop the Germans from hurting his father.

My reflection: It must have been terrible for Elie to have seen all of these horrific things as a child. Even as an adult it is scary. And his father being hit in front of his son is very depressing for Elie. The father of the family is the protector. When something like this happens the emotion of helplessness fills Elie's mind.