Extra Credit
1. Keep a log of all news articles pertaining to a current conflict during the time that we read Night (example: Darfur). Bind them together and write a one page response. What does this situation have in common with the Holocaust? Up to 30 extra credit points.
2. Visit the Virginia Holocaust Museum located in Shockoe Bottom for 30 extra credit points. Write a poem or journal entry in response to what you see there. Include a photograph of yourself at the museum, a parent's note, and/or a brochure to verify your visit.

Night Project
You will research a current conflict and write a first person narrative from the point of view of a person who has experienced it. (not applicable in 2008)

A Note on Translation
The title of the movie Lost in Translation plays on the fact that sentiments can never be translated exactly from one language to another. Sometimes there just isn't a corresponding word; sometimes there is a nuance that the "target language" (language into which the original work in the "source language" is being translated) cannot capture. In Spanish one says, "I have hunger," which is somehow different from "I am hungry" in English. In French the word for wife and woman is the same, which may reveal something of the way women are viewed in France.   Poetry is especially difficult to translate because rhyme, alliteration, and meaning cannot all be retained exactly.

Elie's native language is Yiddish, although he also spoke German, Romanian, and Hungarian growing up. After leaving the concentration camps, Elie lived in a French orphanage. There he mastered the French language, and, after waiting ten years to allow himself distance from the experience, wrote his experiences in Yiddish in a 900 page memoir entitled And the World Was Silent.   He adapted this memoir into a much shorter work, Night, in his new language, French (published 1958). Two years later the French was translated into English. Perhaps because French was not Elie's native tongue and because he was not yet fluent in English, the classic translation has always seemed a bit choppy, a bit impersonal.

Elie's wife Marion Wiesel has done the most recent translation of Night. Students who purchased the book probably have this translation. As we read, we will need to keep in mind that we are reading two different translations. In essence, we will be having two different but connected experiences.

General Study
1. The Historical Context of Night from the Chicago Public Library
2. Night Vocabulary Guide from the Chicago Public Library
3. Night Quia Activities from Deep Run High School
4. Night Discussion Questions from the Chicago Public Library

Elie Wiesel
5. Biography from the Academy of Achievement
6. Biography with a timeline from the University of Virginia
7. Interview with Elie Wiesel from the Academy of Achievement
8. "The America I Love" Article written by Elie in 2004 for a "nation of immigrants"

Holocaust
9. Basic Timeline of the Holocaust from Middle Tennessee State University
10. Detailed Timeline of the Holocaust from PBS
11. Timeline of the growth of anti-Semitism from the British Library
12. Sites of death and concentration camps, with estimated number dead from each country, from the University of Illinois
13. Photographs of the Holocaust (warning: some images are graphic) Some pictures include Elie.
14. A Glossary of Holocaust Terms from Middle Tennessee State University
15. The Ghettos from the Florida Center for Instructional Technology
16. Concentration Camps from the Florida Center for Instructional Technology
17. Propaganda from Godwin High School
18. Dr. Mengele from The Biography Channel
19. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
20. The Virginia Holocaust Museum located at 2000 East Cary St.

Quotations by Elie Wiesel

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. How can one not be sensitive to their plight?

Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.