99 Fun Facts About Night by Elie Wiesel

Night ends with Wiesel looking into a mirror for the first time since the ghetto and seeing what?

A corpse gazed back from the depths of the mirror, Wiesel wrote, and the look in its eyes never left him; he was in hospital, getting over an illness that struck soon after the camp was freed.

Night opens a Wiesel trilogy that moves from darkness to light, completed by which two later volumes?

Dawn and Day complete the sequence, which follows the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall; both are novels, unlike the memoir that opens it.

Whose 2006 book-club pick sent a new translation of Night to No. 1 on the New York Times paperback list?

Oprah Winfrey chose Night in January 2006, straight after her previous pick, James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces, was exposed as partly fabricated.

For how long after the war did Wiesel refuse to write about or discuss what he had lived through?

Ten years of silence followed the war, during which Wiesel worked as a journalist writing in French while also teaching Hebrew and serving as a choirmaster.

Which director approached Wiesel hoping to turn Night into a feature film, only to be refused?

Orson Welles was turned down because Wiesel felt Night would lose its meaning on screen: between his words, he said, he had written silences.

Who translated the 2006 English edition of Night, issued with a new preface by Wiesel himself?

His wife, Marion Wiesel, had fled Nazi-ruled Vienna as a child and survived the war herself; she translated 14 of his books from French into English.

Which French novelist, Nobel laureate of 1952, wrote Night's preface and pressed Wiesel to write it?

François Mauriac met the young journalist in 1954 and, after an interview in which he kept speaking of Jesus, told him 'maybe you should talk about it'; he then helped find La Nuit a Paris publisher.

Which South American city's Yiddish press issued the 1956 original of Night in a series on Polish Jewry?

Buenos Aires's Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina printed Un di velt hot geshvign; Wiesel later shortened and reshaped it into the French La Nuit.

Wiesel's birthplace Sighet, now in Romania's Maramureș county, lies in which historical region?

Transylvania's Sighet was home to more than 10,000 Jews, over a third of the town, when Wiesel was a child; nearly all were deported in four transports in May 1944.

Who discusses the Kabbalah with young Eliezer early in Night, to his father's disapproval?

Moshe the Beadle is deported to Poland on a cattle train, escapes and comes back to warn Sighet of what he saw; nobody listens, which makes him Night's first unheeded witness.

Which woman's cries of seeing flames on the train make her Night's second unheeded witness?

Madame Schächter was beaten into silence by the others in the wagon; when the train pulled into Birkenau, they saw for themselves the fire she had been screaming about.

Night's French edition is dedicated to Wiesel's parents and which younger sister, killed at Auschwitz?

Tzipora, the youngest of Wiesel's three sisters, was sent to the gas chamber with their mother on arrival; the elder two, Hilda and Beatrice, survived, as he learned only after the war.

Which text does Night's narrator study by day in Sighet, weeping by night over the ruined Temple?

The Talmud filled his days in Sighet; after his first night in the camp, Wiesel wrote, that student, the child he had been, was consumed in the flames.

Germany's occupation of which country in March 1944 ends the calm years that open Night?

Hungary, which had ruled Sighet since 1940, was occupied by its German ally in March 1944; within two months the deportation trains to Auschwitz were running.

Sighet, Wiesel's hometown, sits on the Tisa river at Romania's border with which country?

Ukraine lies just across the Tisa at Solotvyno; the river became a frontier only after the First World War, when the Maramureș region was divided and its north bank went to Czechoslovakia.

Wiesel was 15 when Sighet's Jews were ordered in spring 1944 to wear which badge?

The yellow star drew a shrug from his father, who said it wasn't lethal; Wiesel answers him on the page, 'Poor Father! Of what then did you die?'

Night's 'Buna', the Auschwitz sub-camp Monowitz, took its nickname from a plant built to make what?

Synthetic rubber gave Buna its name, from butadiene plus Na for sodium, at an IG Farben works beside the camp; Primo Levi, author of If This Is a Man, was held there in the same months as Wiesel and his father.

Night's January 1945 march from Buna ends at which town, where open wagons wait for Buchenwald?

Gleiwitz's barracks were so crowded that prisoners slept on top of one another, the living waking above the dead; from there a train carried them on to Buchenwald.

On the roofless wagon ride to Buchenwald in Night, what is the only water the prisoners get?

Falling snow was their only drink for ten days and nights; of the hundred men in Eliezer's wagon, only twelve were alive to climb out at Buchenwald.

What does Rabbi Eliahou's son do on Night's evacuation march that Eliezer prays never to repeat?

Runs ahead, leaving his father behind: the son had seen his father limping and let the distance grow, and Eliezer asks God, in whom he says he no longer believes, for strength never to do the same.

Which holiday's camp service in Night draws Eliezer's protest, 'Why, but why would I bless Him'?

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, finds him standing apart while thousands pray; he writes that he felt strong, the accuser, with God the accused.

Which prayer does Eliezer's father recite for the living themselves in Night's first camp scene?

The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is murmured for the living; Wiesel writes that in the long history of the Jews he does not know whether anyone had ever said it for themselves.

Night's famous litany calls the first night in camp 'seven times cursed and seven times' what?

Sealed ends the line in the 1960 English text of the litany that begins 'Never shall I forget that night'; the 2006 retranslation trims the phrase to 'seven times sealed'.

Wiesel's father died in Buchenwald three months before liberation, weakened by a beating and which disease?

Dysentery had left him too weak to leave his bunk when an SS officer struck him for begging for water; by the morning of 29 January 1945 another man lay in his place.

After his father's death in Night, Eliezer writes that he dreams only of an extra ration of what?

Soup is all he dreams of in Buchenwald's children's block; even on the day the camp was freed, Wiesel writes, the prisoners thought first of food, and of revenge there was not a sign.

In Night's last pages, who takes control of Buchenwald on 11 April 1945, hours before the Americans arrive?

Prisoners' own resistance had been delaying the SS evacuation; on the morning the last prisoners were to be marched out, Wiesel writes, it attacked the guards, and American troops arrived hours later.

Before Buchenwald, Wiesel later said, his main reason for trying to survive was what?

Knowing his father was still alive kept him going, he said years later: 'I knew that if I died, he would die.' In Night's later chapters the son becomes the father's caregiver.

Which courtroom word did Wiesel use for Night, a book scholars struggle to read as plain record?

Deposition was his word, yet critics have labelled Night everything from 'autobiographical novel' to 'memoir-novel', and Ruth Franklin argues its power came at the cost of literal truth.

Which event at Buna fills Night's prisoners with joy, though it could have killed them?

An Allied air raid by American bombers hit the works beside the camp; they no longer feared that death, Wiesel writes, and every bomb that exploded gave them new confidence in life.

What does the title of Wiesel's 1956 original, Un di velt hot geshvign, mean in English?

And the World Remained Silent was the Yiddish title, and the 1954 manuscript behind it was an angry historical account; critic Ruth Franklin says the pruning into French turned it into a work of art.

Wiesel began writing Night's manuscript on a ship to which country, sent to report on missionaries?

Brazil was the destination, and by the end of the voyage he had a manuscript of more than 800 pages; he had been sent to cover Christian missionaries working among Jewish communities.

Wiesel's 1954 bid to interview which French premier led him to the novelist who prefaced Night?

Pierre Mendès France was the target; the novelist, his friend, kept talking of Jesus until Wiesel snapped that Jewish children had suffered more than Jesus on his cross — and was then urged to write.

Which Paris publisher, born as a clandestine wartime press, issued the French edition of Night in 1958?

Les Éditions de Minuit took the book after other French houses turned it down as too morbid, Wiesel said, even though a Nobel laureate had carried it from publisher to publisher himself.

Jérôme Lindon, the Paris editor who cut and titled La Nuit, was also the publisher of which Irish-born playwright?

Samuel Beckett's Molloy came out under Lindon in 1951 after other publishers had rejected it; seven years later Lindon took on Wiesel's memoir, which other French houses had also turned away.

Which New York house published Night in 1960 after several English-language publishers had turned it down?

Hill & Wang's Arthur Wang, who Wiesel said 'believed in literature as others believe in God', took the book in 1959; he and Lawrence Hill had left another publisher to start the firm in 1956.

Night's first American printing of 3,000 copies, priced at $3, took how long to sell out?

Three years passed before those 3,000 copies were gone — 1,046 sold in the first 18 months — though reviews won television interviews and a meeting with Saul Bellow.

Why did the New York Times eventually remove Night from its paperback bestseller list?

Most sales were educational, the paper found: it judged Night no new best seller but a classic like Animal Farm, selling year after year through course adoptions.

Which Nobel Prize did Wiesel receive in 1986, the committee hailing him as a 'messenger to mankind'?

Peace was the prize: the Nobel committee praised a message of 'peace, atonement and human dignity', and three months later the Wiesels set up a foundation for humanity with the money.

Days before Night's evacuation march in January 1945, Eliezer has an operation on which part of his body?

His foot was still bleeding when he chose the march over the infirmary, fearing the patients would be killed; he learned after the war that the Russians freed those who stayed behind within days.

After the war Wiesel studied literature, philosophy and psychology at which Paris university?

The Sorbonne gave him lectures by Martin Buber and Jean-Paul Sartre, and his evenings went to Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Thomas Mann; by 19 he was a working journalist writing in French.

What does Wiesel's childhood home in Sighet, vandalised in August 2018, now house?

A Holocaust museum fills the house where he was born; of a pre-war community of more than 10,000 Jews, the 2002 census found 20 in the town, and one synagogue remains.

Wiesel moved to New York in the mid-1950s as correspondent for a daily newspaper from which country?

Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth sent him; he had reported from the new state for the French paper L'arche in the late 1940s, and New York became home for the rest of his life.

From 1976 Wiesel held the Andrew Mellon professorship in the humanities at which institution?

Boston University kept him for four decades, teaching in both its religion and philosophy departments, and created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honour.

Which president named Wiesel to chair the commission behind America's national Holocaust memorial?

Jimmy Carter set up the commission with Wiesel in the chair; fifteen years later Wiesel lit the memorial's eternal flame beside President Bill Clinton on its opening day.

Whose 2008 Ponzi scheme wiped out the investments of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity?

Bernard Madoff had managed the foundation's endowment, which Wiesel had seeded with the Nobel money in 1986; the couple lost much of their own savings too, yet the foundation carried on.

Wiesel co-founded which Jewish magazine in 1975, named after a Yiddish daily of pre-war Warsaw?

Moment took its name from Der Moment, a Warsaw paper founded in 1910 and silenced by a German bomb on the eve of Yom Kippur 1939; co-founder Leonard Fein edited it until 1987.

Wiesel's play The Trial of God unfolds in a 1649 inn on the eve of which Jewish festival?

Purim, with its masks and revelry, frames what Wiesel called a tragic farce; he said it grew from a night in Auschwitz when he watched three rabbis put God on trial.

Which actor joined Wiesel before the UN Security Council in 2006 to raise the crisis in Darfur?

George Clooney had spent ten days in Chad and Sudan that April filming Darfur's refugees with his father; in September he and Wiesel asked the council to act.

Wiesel's Nobel acceptance speech says 'we must always take sides' because neutrality helps whom?

The oppressor, never the victim, is helped by neutrality, he said, adding that silence encourages the tormentor; he had sworn never to be silent wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

Elie Wiesel was famous as a writer, yet his 1986 Nobel Prize came in which category?

Peace was the category: the Nobel committee honoured Wiesel for speaking out against violence, repression and racism, not for his books.

Which SS officer runs the first-night selection that sends Eliezer and his father to work in Night?

Josef Mengele sorted new arrivals into those fit for labour and those sent straight to the gas chambers, a duty he reportedly carried out smiling or whistling.

Which instrument does the Polish prisoner Juliek play among the dying on his last night in Night?

Violin in hand, Juliek had survived the death march from Buna; Eliezer wakes the next morning to find him dead, the instrument crushed beside him.

Fearing he has failed a selection, what does Eliezer's father hand him as an inheritance in Night?

A knife and spoon were everything he owned. Eliezer's father passes the second selection that day, and the relieved boy hands the pair straight back.

What does foreman Franek covet from Eliezer in Night, tormenting the boy's father until he yields?

His gold crown buys only a truce: Franek beats Eliezer's father for marching out of step until the tooth is surrendered, then turns friendlier.

On the arrival ramp in Night, what does a veteran prisoner urge Eliezer and his father to lie about?

Their ages decided who looked fit for work, so the boy adds years and his father takes a decade off before they reach the SS doctor.

Which 1944 decree against Sighet's Jews does Eliezer's father dismiss as harmless in Night?

Wearing the yellow star struck Eliezer's father as nothing to fear when community figures came to him for advice, a judgement the narrator recalls with bitter hindsight.

Wiesel's April 1999 speech in Washington, D.C., carries the title The Perils of what?

Indifference was his lifelong target: he called it, rather than hate, the true opposite of love, and faulted those who stood by while the Holocaust happened.

Wiesel returned to Buchenwald alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel and which visiting US president?

Barack Obama toured the camp with them in June 2009 and spoke of a great-uncle whose division had freed Ohrdruf, one of its sub-camps, in 1945.

How do Sighet's Jews react in Night when a deported neighbour returns to describe mass shootings?

They think him mad, or hungry for pity, and life carries on. Critics call the man, shot in the leg and left for dead, the first unheeded witness in the book.

At which camp does the train from Sighet arrive in Night, where Eliezer last sees his mother?

Birkenau was the killing centre of the Auschwitz complex, and within minutes of the train's arrival the men and women of each family were split apart for good.

Which illness leaves Eliezer's father unable to leave his bunk in the Buchenwald chapters of Night?

Dysentery left him too weak to go outside, so the two men sharing his bunk attacked him for it, and Eliezer found himself unable to protect him.

What do German workmen toss into the prisoners' wagon in Night, setting off a fight to the death?

Bread turns the starving men on one another: Eliezer watches a son kill his own father for a crust, only to be killed for it himself.

What is the last word spoken by the dying father in Wiesel's Night, a call that goes unanswered?

His son's name was a summons Eliezer did not answer: he lay in the bunk above, afraid the SS officer's truncheon would fall on him too.

After Buchenwald is freed in Night, what puts Eliezer in hospital for two weeks, close to death?

Food poisoning followed when the starving prisoners threw themselves on the camp's provisions; their first act as free men, Wiesel notes, was to eat, not to seek revenge.

Which event at Buna fills the prisoners of Wiesel's Night with joy rather than fear one Sunday?

An American air raid on the works left the camp standing but gave the men hope, proof that the war had finally reached the people holding them.

What is A-7713, the code by which Eliezer is known to his guards in Wiesel's Night?

His camp tattoo, inked on the left arm at Auschwitz, became his whole identity there: from that day he answered to the number, stripped even of his name.

Which German composer, forbidden to Jewish musicians at Buna, does Juliek defiantly play in Night?

Beethoven was off-limits because the camp band's Jewish players were barred from German music, which made Juliek's final performance an act of defiance heard only by the dying.

Sighet, the hometown where Wiesel's Night opens, lies in which European mountain range?

Carpathians surround the town, where the Wiesels lived among 10,000 to 20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews until the deportations of May 1944 emptied it.

Buchenwald, the camp where Wiesel's Night ends, stood on a wooded hill outside which German city?

Weimar was Goethe's city, and the SS avoided naming the camp after its hill because the spot was tied to him; after liberation the townspeople were marched up to see it.

In postwar Paris, Wiesel attended lectures by which existentialist who later refused a Nobel Prize?

Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosopher Martin Buber both lectured to the young survivor, who spent his evenings reading Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Thomas Mann.

Which SS officer, later tried in Jerusalem, oversaw the 1944 deportations that took Wiesel's family?

Adolf Eichmann arrived in March 1944 to run the transports; Wiesel, a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, argued that even he should not have been executed.

On which holy day at Buna does Eliezer swallow his ration as an act of rebellion in Night?

Yom Kippur is the fast of atonement, and the prisoners argued over keeping it on starvation rations; Eliezer ate, then felt a great void open inside him.

During which Jewish festival do the Germans arrest Sighet's community leaders in Night?

Passover was in its seventh day when the arrests came; curfews, confiscations and the move into two ghettos followed.

Before the Germans reach Sighet in Night, where does Eliezer urge his father to take the family?

Palestine was the dream he later shared at Buna with two brothers who regretted, as he did, that their parents had not left while there was still time.

What happened to Wiesel in New York in 1956 that kept him in America and led to US citizenship?

A taxi struck him soon after he arrived as a correspondent; by the time he recovered his visas had expired, so the stateless reporter applied to become an American.

In 1985 Wiesel urged President Reagan to his face not to visit a cemetery in which German town?

Bitburg held 49 Waffen-SS graves among some 2,000; Reagan went anyway, but added a stop at Bergen-Belsen and spent only eight minutes at the cemetery.

At whose 1987 trial in Lyon did Wiesel take the witness stand to speak for the murdered?

Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon, was convicted of crimes against humanity and jailed for life after Wiesel and other survivors testified.

Night's 2006 book-club selection followed a scandal over which partly fabricated memoir?

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey had just been exposed, and critic Ruth Franklin suggests Night was picked to restore the club's credibility.

Which force takes over the train of Sighet's expelled Jews once it crosses into Poland in Night?

The Gestapo moved the deportees onto trucks and drove them to a forest, where they were made to dig pits and then shot. One man, taken for dead, made it back to Sighet to raise the alarm.

How does Eliezer respond in Night on waking to find another man lying in his father's bunk?

He cannot weep, and deep down he even senses something like relief at being freed of a burden, the confession that makes the scene so hard to read.

What did Wiesel's father, a respected figure among Sighet's Jews, do for a living?

Grocer by trade, he stood for reason in the household while Wiesel's mother stood for faith, and neighbours turned to him for help and advice.

On his first night in the camp in Night, Eliezer thinks of ending his life by running into what?

The electric fence seemed a quicker end than the fire he was being marched towards; two steps from the pit, the column was ordered to turn aside.

What puts Eliezer in Buna's camp hospital in Night just before the January 1945 evacuation?

A foot operation left him barely able to walk, yet he and his father chose the march, fearing the sick would be killed; those who stayed were liberated.

In Night, who soon freed the patients Eliezer left behind in Buna's camp hospital?

The Red Army reached the Auschwitz camps on 27 January 1945, days after the Wiesels marched out; the narrator notes with bitter hindsight that staying would have meant freedom.

In which country did Wiesel deliver his acceptance speech for the 1986 Nobel Prize?

Norway hosts this one Nobel ceremony, held at Oslo's City Hall; soon afterwards Wiesel and Marion used the prize money to start a foundation fighting intolerance.

Which Italian chemist and writer was, like Wiesel, a prisoner at the Buna camp of Monowitz in 1944?

Primo Levi lay ill with scarlet fever in the infirmary when the camp was evacuated and was freed there, while Wiesel was marched west; both wrote classics of the camps.

Which Kapo, prone to violent fits, has Eliezer whipped for catching him with a girl in Night?

Idek had marched his whole work unit to the warehouse on a rest day just to be alone with her; Eliezer walked in on them and paid with twenty-five lashes.

Which general's Third Army reaches Buchenwald at the close of Wiesel's Night?

George Patton toured the camp himself and ordered the mayor of the nearest city to send a thousand citizens to see what had been done there.

Which German industrial giant ran the Buna works that named the labour camp in Wiesel's Night?

IG Farben paid the SS a daily fee for every prisoner it used, and 13 of its directors were convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg after the war.

Which devout prisoner in Night asks for a mourner's prayer that his friends then forget to say?

Akiba Drumer had sung Hasidic melodies and read a promise of rescue into scripture; once his faith gave way he stopped fighting and was taken in a selection.

Tibi and Yossi, the brothers Eliezer befriends at Buna in Night, come from which country?

Czechoslovakia was home to the pair, inseparable Zionists who had lost both parents and who taught Eliezer Hebrew songs while the three of them worked.

Who comes to the ghetto in Night offering the Wiesels refuge in her village, only to be refused?

Their former servant begged the family to follow her to safety, but Eliezer's father would not go, one of several chances of escape the book records with hindsight.

Which title did Wiesel give the first volume of his memoirs, ending in 1969?

All Rivers Run to the Sea stops in 1969, the year he married; a second volume, And the Sea Is Never Full, picks up the story from there.

Stein, the relative who finds the Wiesels at Auschwitz in Night, comes from which Belgian city?

Antwerp was where Stein had left his family; Eliezer lies that they are well, and the comfort lasts only until a later transport brings real news.

In Night, the foreign Jews expelled from Sighet are driven to a forest near Kolomay in which region?

Galicia lay across the border in German-occupied Poland, and the killings there, told early in the book, came long before Sighet's own deportation.

Who made the first English translation of Wiesel's Night, published in New York in 1960?

Stella Rodway's version sold barely a thousand copies in its first eighteen months, long before the book became a fixture of school reading lists.

Wiesel was taught that his family descended from which medieval French rabbi and Bible commentator?

Rashi, born in Troyes in the eleventh century, wrote commentaries so central that Bible study among Orthodox Jews still begins with them.

Which gardener from Buna saves Eliezer from being strangled in the wagon to Buchenwald in Night?

Meir Katz was the strongest man in the wagon, yet he broke down before the journey ended and never left the train at its destination.

What was the first name of Eliezer's father, later given by Wiesel to his own son?

Shlomo, spelled Chlomo in the first English version of the book, lived on in Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, born in 1972 and known by his middle name.