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| A young German soldier fighting in the trenches during World War I. Paul is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. He is, at heart, a kind, compas-sionate, and sensitive young man, but the 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. He is a resourceful, inventive man and always finds food, clothing, and blankets whenever he and his friends need them. |
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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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| A pompous, ignorant, 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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| One of Paul’s classmates and close friends during the war. Leer serves with Paul in the Second Company. He was the first in Paul’s class to lose his virginity. |
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| What were the main themes of "All Quiet on The Western Front"? |
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| The horror of war, the effect of war on a soldier, and nationalism and political power. |
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| The narrator of Night and the stand-in for the memoir’s author, Elie Wiesel. Night traces Eliezer’s psychological journey, 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. It is important to note that we learn Eliezer’s last name only in passing, and that it is never repeated. His story—which parallels Wiesel’s own biography—is intensely personal, but it is also representative of the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Jewish teenagers. |
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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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| Eliezer’s Kapo (a prisoner conscripted by the Nazis to police other prisoners) at the electrical equipment warehouse in Buna. Despite the fact that they also faced the cruelty of the Nazis, many Kapos were as cruel to the prisoners as the Germans. During moments of insane rage, Idek beats Eliezer. |
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| Eliezer’s father’s friend from Buna. In the cattle car to Buchenwald, Katz saves Eliezer’s life from an unidentified assailant. |
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| Eliezer’s relative from Antwerp, Belgium, whom he and his father encounter in Auschwitz. Trying to bolster his spirit, Eliezer lies to Stein and tells him that his family is still alive and healthy. |
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| Eliezer's youngest sister. |
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| What was the main idea in "The Devil's Arithmetic?" |
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| In the movie, a young girl named Hannah travels back in time to the Holocaust. She begins to learn about the events of that time and better appretiate the outcome and also respect her culture when she returns home. |
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