Night by Elie Wiesel Trivia
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99 free Night by Elie Wiesel trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Night is the memoir most readers meet first when they study the Holocaust: a teenager's account of the spring of 1944 in Sighet, the transports, the camps, and a father and son trying not to lose each other. It is short, spare and widely assigned, and it carries a publishing story of its own — a long Yiddish manuscript, a French edition, an English translation that sold slowly for decades and then, half a century on, a new translation and a book-club pick that put it at the top of the bestseller lists. These 99 questions stay at the level of a memorial placard. They cover the town and its people as the memoir names them, the places and dates as the text gives them, the passages teachers return to, and the scholarly debate over how the memoir was cut and shaped. They then follow Wiesel beyond the war: the years of silence, the journalism, the novels and the play, the professorship, the foundation, the Nobel Prize and the speeches in which he asked the world never to look away. Each answer carries a one-line explanation and a citation, so the set works for a ninth- or tenth-grade English unit, a remembrance lesson, or anyone revisiting a book they first read as a teenager.
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Q 01Night ends with Wiesel looking into a mirror for the first time since the ghetto and seeing what?
A corpse
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.
Q 02Night opens a Wiesel trilogy that moves from darkness to light, completed by which two later volumes?
Dawn and Day
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.
Q 03Whose 2006 book-club pick sent a new translation of Night to No. 1 on the New York Times paperback list?
Oprah Winfrey
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.
Q 04For how long after the war did Wiesel refuse to write about or discuss what he had lived through?
Ten years
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.
Q 05Which director approached Wiesel hoping to turn Night into a feature film, only to be refused?
Orson Welles
Orson Welles was turned down because Wiesel felt Night would lose its meaning on screen: between his words, he said, he had written silences.
Q 06Who translated the 2006 English edition of Night, issued with a new preface by Wiesel himself?
His wife
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.
Q 07Which French novelist, Nobel laureate of 1952, wrote Night's preface and pressed Wiesel to write it?
François Mauriac
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.
Q 08Which South American city's Yiddish press issued the 1956 original of Night in a series on Polish Jewry?
Buenos Aires
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.
Q 09Wiesel's birthplace Sighet, now in Romania's Maramureș county, lies in which historical region?
Transylvania
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.
Q 10Who discusses the Kabbalah with young Eliezer early in Night, to his father's disapproval?
Moshe the Beadle
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.
Q 11Which woman's cries of seeing flames on the train make her Night's second unheeded witness?
Madame Schächter
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.
Q 12Night's French edition is dedicated to Wiesel's parents and which younger sister, killed at Auschwitz?
Tzipora
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.
Q 13Which text does Night's narrator study by day in Sighet, weeping by night over the ruined Temple?
The Talmud
Q 21Which holiday's camp service in Night draws Eliezer's protest, 'Why, but why would I bless Him'?
Rosh Hashanah
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.
Q 22Which prayer does Eliezer's father recite for the living themselves in Night's first camp scene?
The Kaddish
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.
Q 23Night's famous litany calls the first night in camp 'seven times cursed and seven times' what?
Sealed
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.
Q 14Germany's occupation of which country in March 1944 ends the calm years that open Night?
Hungary
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.
Q 15Sighet, Wiesel's hometown, sits on the Tisa river at Romania's border with which country?
Ukraine
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.
Q 16Wiesel was 15 when Sighet's Jews were ordered in spring 1944 to wear which badge?
Yellow star
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?'
Q 17Night's 'Buna', the Auschwitz sub-camp Monowitz, took its nickname from a plant built to make what?
Synthetic rubber
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.
Q 18Night's January 1945 march from Buna ends at which town, where open wagons wait for Buchenwald?
Gleiwitz
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.
Q 19On the roofless wagon ride to Buchenwald in Night, what is the only water the prisoners get?
Falling snow
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.
Q 20What does Rabbi Eliahou's son do on Night's evacuation march that Eliezer prays never to repeat?
Runs ahead, leaving his father behind
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.
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'.
Q 24Wiesel's father died in Buchenwald three months before liberation, weakened by a beating and which disease?
Dysentery
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.
Q 25After his father's death in Night, Eliezer writes that he dreams only of an extra ration of what?
Soup
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.
Q 26In Night's last pages, who takes control of Buchenwald on 11 April 1945, hours before the Americans arrive?
Prisoners' own resistance
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.
Q 27Before Buchenwald, Wiesel later said, his main reason for trying to survive was what?
Knowing his father was still alive
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.
Q 28Which courtroom word did Wiesel use for Night, a book scholars struggle to read as plain record?
Deposition
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.
Q 29Which event at Buna fills Night's prisoners with joy, though it could have killed them?
An Allied air raid
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.
Q 30What does the title of Wiesel's 1956 original, Un di velt hot geshvign, mean in English?
And the World Remained Silent
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.