Name______________________________________ Classwork/Homework

Night
Assignment #4 Pages 63-80
On a separate sheet of paper, answer six of the following questions including questions 1, 12, and 15

1. In the Jewish faith, the eve of Rosh Hashanah is the last day of the year. How does the phrase
“last day” take on a new significance in their lives? What does “last day” mean to them besides just
New Years Eve?

2. Why can’t Wiesel bless God during the service?

3. We previously learned about Adam and Eve. On page 64 Wiesel says to God, “when you were deceived
[by them] You drove them out.” We also know about Noah’s ark, when God decided to wipe out a
generation of people who were violent and corrupt. Why does Wiesel bring these Biblical stories up?
What does he ask?

4. Look up the word “mirage.” Why does Wiesel call the service on page 65 a mirage?

5. What stage of grief is Wiesel in now? (See Question 11 on Assignment 2.) What are two things in the
text that make you think this?

6. Back on page 31, someone begins to say the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, as he thinks that he is
about to die. Wiesel writes that “I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the
Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer of the dead for themselves.” Yet on page 65, the people
recite the Kaddish for people they know, including themselves without a second thought. How do you
interpret this?

7. What two reasons does Wiesel give for why he does not fast on Yom
Kippur?

8. What literary device is used when Wiesel says, “the SS gave us a fine
New Year’s gift”?

9. Wiesel says on page 69 that “Everything was regulated by bells.” When

he dreams of normal life, life outside of the camp, he dreams of a world
without bells. What do we normally associate with bells? What times and
places are bells normally rung? Is this perhaps irony?

10. The only change after selection was that rations were more meager.
Why do you think this is so? What were the prisoners able to do?

11. What is Wiesel’s inheritance from his father?

Bells at the camp Dachau

12. Akiba Drumer is initially is praying all of the time, reciting pages of the Talmud from memory
and having philosophical and religious debates with himself. But then one day he says “God is no
longer with us.” Wiesel writes on page 73, “as soon as he felt the first cracks forming in his faith, he
had lost his reason for struggling and had begun to die.” Wiesel also feels cracks forming in his
faith, but unlike Akiba he does not give himself up to die. How is Wiesel’s response to losing his faith
in God different from Akiba’s? Instead of desperation, what does Wiesel feel?
13. What does the man next to Wiesel in the hospital warn him about?

14. Morphine is a powerful painkiller often given to patients who are terminally ill or in great pain. On
page 76, what does Wiesel say was an “injection of morphine” to the prisoners?

15. The faceless man next to Wiesel says

that Hitler is the only man who has kept
all of his promises. Who is this in contrast
to? Who has not kept their promises to
the Jews?

16. The Russians (who fought against

Germany in World War II) are getting
closer. If you were Wiesel and his father,
would you stay behind in the hospital or
would you evacuate with the rest of the
camp? Why?

17. Why does the head of the block order the

block to be cleaned out? Again, why is this
irony?

Hospital ward of Dachau Concentration Camp