Perhaps Mr. Wiesel did see flames gushing out of a tall chimney; however, the sight of flames gushing from a coal-fired crematorium chimney is not seen very frequently, or at all, outside of narratives describing Holocaust crematoria. A crematorium is not a blast furnace.

Mr. Wiesel tells us that he turned on the reception platform and saw an old man fall the ground and a nearby SS-man putting away his pistol. He implies, but does not say that the SS-man had just shot the old Jewish man.

Elie Wiesel was advised by one of the veteran Auschwitz inmates to say that he was eighteen years old instead of fourteen; his father was advised to say he was forty instead of fifty. There is a strong implication that the inmate believed that the consequences of being too young or too old would be dire.

The people on the Wiesel transport were asked by veteran prisoners why they had not hanged themselves rather than allow themselves to be deported to Auschwitz. The prisoners were amazed that the Wiesels -- as late as 1944 -- had never heard of Auschwitz.

This is odd. Elie Wiesel has told us that the Jews of Sighet had been listening to Allied radio broadcasts. Walter Laqueur, the Director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London, wrote in his 1980 study, The Terrible Secret, that Auschwitz was "a veritable archipelago," that "Auschwitz inmates . . . were, in fact, dispersed all over Silesia, and . . . met with thousands of people," and that "hundreds of civilian employees . . . worked at Auschwitz," and that "journalists travelled in the General Government [German administered Poland] and were bound to hear," etc. London had to have had a pretty good idea about conditions in Auschwitz.

After being told by veteran inmates that they would ultimately be cremated at Auschwitz, some of the younger Jews wanted to revolt, to escape, to tell the world about Auschwitz. But they didn't.

The newly arrived Jews from Sighet were first separated by sex. Dr. Mengele makes his first appearance in Night. He is on the reception platform determining where the arriving men from Sighet will be sent. He sent Elie Wiesel and his father "to the left."

We are told that a prisoner warned Elie and his father that going "to the left" meant that they were being sent straight to the crematory. The prisoners information was not correct. The Wiesels were being sent to a reception barracks.

Since the men who were sent "to the right" were all neighbours of the Wiesels and were sharing a common ordeal with them, it would be helpful in the evaluation of the credibility of rumours spread by prisoners to know if the men sent "to the right" were immediately killed or not. Unfortunately Elie Wiesel did not discover their fate -- or he has chosen not to include this information in Night.

On the way to the barracks Mr. Wiesel reports that he saw flames from a "gigantic ditch" into which the Germans were dumping babies from a lorry. "I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes . . . those children in the flames." And he reports: "A little farther on was another and larger ditch for adults." As anyone familiar with the training of psychiatrists knows, psychiatrist are taught to suspect dishonesty when a patient voluntarily and emphatically suggests that something is really, really true. This is the only time in Night that Elie Wiesel insists upon his own veracity in such an emotional manner.

That first night was the night that "has turned my life into one long night."

In the reception barracks the Jews were forced to strip naked and allowed to retain only their shoes and their belts and their heads were shaved. As anyone familiar with the standard histories of the Holocaust -- again, Reitlinger, Hilberg, and Dawidowicz -- knows, Jewish prisoners were forced to disrobe and to have their hair shaved off before they were forced into the gas-chambers. We now learn from Elie Wiesel that it was the standard practice to force all new arrivals to disrobe and to have their hair shaved off. [wes: This, of course, is a necessity in the control of head lice carrying typhus, which had been a major public health problem between the wars.]

Meanwhile SS officers selected the strongest to work in the Sonderkommando, the unit that worked in the crematoria. Then the new arrivals are marched naked to be disinfected, given a hot shower, and issued uniforms.

But Reitlinger, Hilberg, and Dawidowicz tell us that the gas-chambers in which the Jews were exterminated by means of cyanide released from the crystals of the insecticide Zyklon-B were located in the cellars of the crematories in Birkenau. The Jewish men in the Sonderkommando were forced to live isolated in the crematories and help in the cremation of the bodies of the people gassed in the cellars. The gassings themselves are normally described as an important secret of the Nazis.

Mr. Wiesel now tells us that a Jewish man, Bela Katz, who had been deported from Sighet the week before and who had been selected to work in the crematoria managed to get a message to the newly- arrived prisoners. He tells them that he had already had to burn the body of his own father. (About how the elder Mr. Katz died we are not told.) This event does suggest that the isolation within which the men of the Sonderkommando are said to have worked was not always successful in preventing even a brand new prisoner from communicating with the prisoners outside of the crematories.

Elie Wiesel and his father were assigned to one of the barracks formerly occupied by Gypsies at Birkenau. About the fate of the previous occupants there is not one word in Night. This is odd. Most histories of the Holocaust tell us that the Gypsy section at Birkenau had been exterminated in dramatic circumstances order to make room for the influx of Jews from Hungary like the Wiesels. This is especially odd since we will soon meet in Wiesel's book prisoners who had been in Auschwitz for years. They would have known.

Odder still is the fact that Elie Wiesel now introduces his recollections that a brutal Gypsy deportee was in charge of the barracks to which he and his father were assigned and that this Gypsy knocked Elie's father to the ground with a blow. Later, ten more Gypsies with whips and truncheons will escort the new arrivals out of the Birkenau camp to the separate Auschwitz main camp.

It is reasonable to believe that the Gypsies would have had a powerful interest in knowing the fate of the rest of the Gypsies at Auschwitz. Yet there is nothing in Night to tell us about the reported extermination of the Gypsy section at Birkenau.

Before being admitted to Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp at Auschwitz and still the centre of the administration of the Auschwitz camp tourist complex, the Wiesels were forced to take another hot shower.

Showers, Mr. Wiesel informs us were "a compulsory formality at the entrance to all these camps. Even if you were simply passing from one to another several times a day, you still had to go through the baths every time." Mr. Wiesel never tells us why the Germans insisted on all of this cleanliness.

It seems logical to conclude the shaving of the hair, the disinfection, and the compulsory hot showers were hygienic measures mandated in order to prevent the spread of diseases among the prisoners.

Mr. Wiesel and his father were assigned to Block 17 -- a two-story building made of concrete. Elie tells us that there were gardens among the barracks.

It was only after being transferred from Birkenau Camp to the Main Camp that Mr. Wiesel became prisoner "A-7713." -- his camp tattoo number. This fact tells us that prisoners only received an official identity after they had survived a period of quarantine at the Birkenau camp and had been assigned to a more permanent destination within the Auschwitz complex.

Here the "Wiesel of Sighet," the author's father, was searched out by the husband of his wife's niece, the "Stein of Antwerp." The "Stein of Antwerp" had been deported in 1942 and wanted news of the wife and sons he had left behind in Belgium. The Wiesels had not received any letters from Antwerp since 1940. Elie Wiesel tells us that he lied to his relative and told him that his mother had received news that her niece and the boys were fine. The "Stein of Antwerp" was grateful for the news and began sharing his food rations with the Wiesels. Since the "Stein of Antwerp" had been deported so long before the Wiesels, and he was both a Jew and a relative by marriage, he might have been an excellent source of information about Auschwitz and what had been happening there. Whatever he told the Wiesels, it is not in Night.

At the end of the Wiesel's three weeks in the main camp, a transport from Antwerp arrived. The "Stein of Antwerp" sought it out for more news. He never came back to see the Wiesels.

Elie and his father were re-assigned to the Buna Camp, a large chemical factory and concentration camp that was part of the Auschwitz complex of camps. German guards marched the Wiesels "slowly" to the Buna factory camp.

There they were required to undergo another hot shower and they were quarantined for three days before given any work assignments.

Mr. Wiesel does not tell us that the purpose of the Buna plant was to manufacture synthetic rubber. The Allies were desperately interested in information about artificial rubber production because Japan had over-run much of the rubber producing territory in the world. Allied intelligence would have wanted to know what happened at this crucial German enterprise.

Here he tells us that there were children in the Buna factory camp and that some senior prisoners gave "bread, and soup, and margarine" to the children. He adds that some senior prisoners recruited children for homosexual purposes. Next, a three-doctor panel gave each new prisoner a medical and dental examination. "Anyone who had gold in his mouth had his number added to a list."

The Wiesels were assigned to the barracks that contained the camp orchestra and to a unit of prisoners that worked in a warehouse for electrical equipment under the direct command of a prisoner named "Idek."

Standard histories of the Holocaust tell us that there was an orchestra at Auschwitz that played music while Jews were "selected" for the gas-chambers. We are also told that the gas-chambers were in the cellars of the crematories. The Buna camp was entirely separate from the camps in which crematories are known to have existed. The purpose of an orchestra in the Buna Camp is not explained in Night.

The musician's barrack was under the supervision of a German Jew. Each prisoner was issued a blanket, a wash bowl, and a bar of soap.

Since Elie Wiesel had a gold tooth, he had to deal with a Jewish camp dentist who wanted his tooth. Soon the dentist was arrested by the Germans for running a traffic in contraband gold teeth. Elie kept his gold tooth for a while longer.

Mr. Wiesel tells us that he was beaten twice by "Idek." The first time, he was beaten for no reason at all. The second time, he was beaten for discovering that "Idek" had made his entire command work on Sunday, apparently a standard day of rest for the prisoners in the Buna complex, so that Idek could have a sexual interlude with a Polish girl at the factory.

Since Mr. Wiesel always identifies persons mentioned in Night by their nationality and identifies them as "Jewish" when applicable, it is odd that all of this information is omitted about "Idek." Since all standard histories of the Holocaust explain that the prisoners at Auschwitz always wore emblems on their clothing that announced their classification or cause of incarceration: politic prisoner, conscientious objector, common criminal, homosexual, etc., and that Jewish prisoners had an unmistakable emblem sewn on their uniforms; Idek's Jewishness or lack thereof would have been immediately apparent to all of the other inmates. Perhaps the circumstance that "Idek" was engaging in a consenting sexual relationship with a gentile girl led our author to omit "Idek's" religion.

Mr. Wiesel tells us that the Jewish prisoners were working along side of non-Jewish prisoners as well as "civilian workers." The "Idek" incident shows that the relations between prisoners and "civilian workers" could lead to intimacies in which confidence are frequently shared.