Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust—a Greek word that means “burnt offering” or sacrifice. The Holocaust refers to the multiple genocides spanning from 1933 to 1945 that were enacted by Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Aside from systematically murdering around six million Jewish people, the Nazis killed five million other people from targeted groups, including Roma, political opponents, and people with mental and physical conditions.

To expedite the killings, the Nazis used gas chambers that could be filled with poisonous or asphyxiant fumes. The first group they put in the gas chambers were people with mental and physical conditions. The Nazis then installed gas chambers in the concentration camps, areas where the mass imprisonment and forced labor of Jewish people and other targeted groups took place. Auschwitz, the biggest concentration camp, had multiple gas chambers, and the “smoke” (Lines 3, 5) that Wiesel witnesses in the poem comes from burning the gas chamber victims’ bodies in crematoriums. Though Wiesel’s two older sisters survived, his mother and younger sister were both killed in the gas chambers.

The concentration camps were brutal. As Wiesel’s father tells him in Night, “Humanity is not concerned with us.