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- The narrator of Night and the stand-in for the memoir’s author, Elie Wiesel.
-as the Holocaust robs him of his faith in God and exposes him to the deepest inhumanity of which man is capable. Despite many tests of his humanity, however, Eliezer maintains his devotion to his father. |
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- Eliezer’s father.
- Chlomo is respected by the entire Jewish community of Sighet, and by his son as well. He and Eliezer desperately try to remain together throughout their concentration camp ordeal. |
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| Eliezer’s teacher of Jewish mysticism, Moshe is a poor Jew who lives in Sighet. He is deported before the rest of the Sighet Jews but escapes and returns to tell the town what the Nazis are doing to the Jews. Tragically, the community takes Moshe for a lunatic. |
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| Jewish Holocaust victim who gradually loses his faith in God as a result of his experiences in the concentration camp. |
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| A Jewish woman from Sighet who is deported in the same cattle car as Eliezer. Madame Schächter is taken for a madwoman when, every night, she screams that she sees furnaces in the distance. She proves to be a prophetess, however, as the trains soon arrive at the crematoria of Auschwitz. |
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| A young musician whom Eliezer meets in Auschwitz. Juliek reappears late in the memoir, when Eliezer hears him playing the violin after the death march to Gleiwitz. |
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| - Two brothers with whom Eliezer becomes friendly in Buna. Tibi and Yosi are Zionists. Along with Eliezer, they make a plan to move to Palestine after the war. |
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| the cruel doctor who presided over the selection of arrivals at Auschwitz/Birkenau. Known as the “Angel of Death,” Mengele’s words sentenced countless prisoners to death in the gas chambers. He also directed horrific experiments on human subjects at the camp. |
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| A devout Jewish prisoner whose son abandons him in one of many instances in Night of a son behaving cruelly toward his father. Eliezer prays that he will never behave as Rabbi Eliahou’s son behaves |
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- A young German soldier fighting in the trenches during World War I.
- he brutal expe-rience of warfare teaches him to detach himself from his feelings. His account of the war is a bitter invective against sentimental, romantic ideals of warfare. |
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- A soldier belonging to Paul’s company and Paul’s best friend in the army. Kat, as he is known, is forty years old at the beginning of the novel and has a family at home.
- Finds food |
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- One of Paul’s classmates who serves with Paul in the Second Company
- An intelligent, speculative young man. |
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| One of Paul’s classmates. Müller is a hardheaded, practical young man, and he plies his friends in the Second Company with questions about their postwar plans. |
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| One of Paul’s friends in the Second Company. Tjaden is a wiry young man with a voracious appetite. He bears a deep grudge against Corporal Himmelstoss. |
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| authoritarian schoolmaster in Paul’s high school during the years before the war. Kantorek places intense pressure on Paul and his classmates to fulfill their “patriotic duty” by enlisting in the army. |
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| noncommissioned training officer. Before the war, Himmelstoss was a postman. He is a petty, power-hungry little man who torments Paul and his friends during their training and afterwords tries to amend them. |
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| ne of Paul’s classmates and comrades in the war. After suffering a light wound, Kemmerich contracts gangrene, and his leg has to be amputated. He then dies. |
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| The first to die in the war. Behm did not want to enlist, but he caved under the pressure of the schoolmaster, Kantorek. His ugly, painful death shatters his classmates’ trust in the authorities who convinced them to take part in the war. |
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| One of Paul’s close friends in the Second Company. Detering is a young man with a wife and a farm at home; he is constantly homesick for his farm and family. |
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- A French soldier
- He is the first person that Paul kills in hand-to-hand combat, one of Paul’s most traumatic experiences in the war. |
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-One of Paul’s classmates
-the first in Paul’s class to lose his virginity. |
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| A patient in the Catholic hospital where Paul and Kropp recuperate from their wounds. Lewandowski desperately wants to have sex with his visiting wife but is confined to bed because of a minor fever. |
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