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50 free Night by Elie Wiesel trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Night is the memoir most readers meet first when they study the Holocaust: a teenager's account of the spring of 1944 in Sighet, the transports, the camps, and a father and son trying not to lose each other. It is short, spare and widely assigned, and it carries a publishing story of its own — a long Yiddish manuscript, a French edition, an English translation that sold slowly for decades and then, half a century on, a new translation and a book-club pick that put it at the top of the bestseller lists. These 50 questions stay at the level of a memorial placard. They cover the town and its people as the memoir names them, the places and dates as the text gives them, the passages teachers return to, and the scholarly debate over how the memoir was cut and shaped. They then follow Wiesel beyond the war: the years of silence, the journalism, the novels and the play, the professorship, the foundation, the Nobel Prize and the speeches in which he asked the world never to look away. Each answer carries a one-line explanation and a citation, so the set works for a ninth- or tenth-grade English unit, a remembrance lesson, or anyone revisiting a book they first read as a teenager.
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Q 01Night ends with Wiesel looking into a mirror for the first time since the ghetto and seeing what?
A corpse
A corpse stares back at him, the last image of a memoir whose narrator says his first night in camp turned his life 'into one long night'. Critic Ruth Franklin credits that minimalist construction for the book's impact.
Q 02Night begins a Wiesel trilogy moving from darkness to light; what are its two later volumes titled?
Dawn and Day
Dawn and Day complete the sequence, following the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall, so the memoir's darkness gives way to light. Dawn came out in 1961 and Day in 1962.
Q 03Whose 2006 book-club pick held Night at No. 1 on the New York Times paperback list for 18 months?
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey picked Night in January 2006 and then toured Auschwitz with Wiesel for her show; by May 2011 the edition had sold about two million copies, third among all her club's selections.
Q 04For how long after the war did Wiesel refuse to write about or discuss what he had lived through?
Ten years
Ten years of silence followed the war, during which Wiesel worked as a journalist writing in French while also teaching Hebrew and serving as a choirmaster.
Q 05Which director's wish to film Night did Wiesel refuse, lest it lose meaning without its silences?
Orson Welles
Orson Welles wanted to make a feature film of Night, but Wiesel felt it would lose its meaning without the silences between his words. A 2025 documentary, Soul on Fire, traced the book's writing instead.
Q 06Who translated the 2006 English edition of Night, issued with a new preface by Wiesel himself?
His wife
His wife, Marion Wiesel, made the 2006 translation from the French; she translated many of his books, and the Book Club edition had sold over two million copies by May 2011.
Q 07Which French novelist, Nobel laureate of 1952, wrote Night's preface and pressed Wiesel to write it?
François Mauriac
François Mauriac met the young journalist in 1954 and, after an interview in which he kept speaking of Jesus, told him 'maybe you should talk about it'; he then helped find La Nuit a Paris publisher.
Q 08Which city's Yiddish press issued the 1956 original of Night as part of a series on Polish Jewry?
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, home to the Polish-Jewish émigré publisher Mark Turkov, issued the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign in 1956 as the 117th book in a 176-volume series of Yiddish memoirs. It took four more years to reach English readers.
Q 09Wiesel's birthplace Sighet, now in Romania's Maramureș county, lies in which historical region?
Transylvania
Transylvania, in the Carpathian mountains, held the town of Sighet where Wiesel was born in September 1928; the family spoke mainly Yiddish at home, alongside German, Hungarian and Romanian.
Q 10Who discusses the Kabbalah with the teenage Eliezer early in Night, to his father's disapproval?
Moshe the Beadle
Moshe the Beadle is deported to Poland on a cattle train, escapes and comes back to warn Sighet of what he saw; nobody listens, which makes him Night's first unheeded witness.
Q 11Which woman's cries of seeing flames on the train make her Night's second unheeded witness?
Madame Schächter
Madame Schächter screams on the third night of the journey that she can see flames, and the others silence her; the memoir frames her as its second warning that no one is ready to hear.
Q 12Night's French edition is dedicated to Wiesel's parents and which seven-year-old sister?
Tzipora
Tzipora, the youngest of Wiesel's three sisters, was seven when the family was deported in 1944; the elder two, Hilda and Beatrice, survived the war, which Wiesel learned only in Normandy.
Q 13Which text does Night's narrator study by day in Sighet, weeping by night over the ruined Temple?
The Talmud
Q 21Which holiday's camp service in Night draws Eliezer's protest 'Why, but why would I bless Him?'
Rosh Hashanah
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, finds him unable to pray with the others; yet God is not lost to Eliezer entirely, and the memoir reads as an argument with Him rather than a farewell.
Q 22Which prayer does Eliezer's father recite for the living themselves in Night's first camp scene?
The Kaddish
The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is murmured for the living; Wiesel writes that in the long history of the Jews he does not know whether anyone had ever said it for themselves.
Q 23Night's famous litany calls the first night in camp 'seven times cursed and seven times' what?
Sealed
The Talmud fills his days, and mysticism his evenings, against his father's wishes; Night's narrator is an Orthodox boy whose faith the camps will test.
Q 14Germany's occupation of which country in March 1944 ends the calm years that open Night?
Hungary
Hungary, which had ruled Sighet since 1940, was invaded at midnight on 18 March 1944; within two months deportation trains were running to Auschwitz at four a day.
Q 15Sighet, Wiesel's hometown, sits on the Tisa river at Romania's border with which country?
Ukraine
Ukraine lies just across the Tisa, facing the town of Solotvyno; the city was plain Sighet until 1960, when it took the longer name Sighetu Marmației.
Q 16How old was Wiesel when Sighet's Jews were confined to two ghettos in the spring of 1944?
15
15 was his age in the ghetto; born in September 1928, he turned 16 in Buna that autumn and was among the teenagers later sent to Buchenwald's 'Little camp'.
Q 17Night's 'Buna', the Auschwitz sub-camp Monowitz, took its nickname from a plant built to make what?
Synthetic rubber
Synthetic rubber gave Buna its name, from butadiene plus Na for sodium, at an IG Farben works beside the camp; Primo Levi, author of If This Is a Man, was held there in the same months as Wiesel and his father.
Q 18Night's January 1945 march from Buna ends at which town, where open wagons wait for Buchenwald?
Gleiwitz
Gleiwitz held the prisoners for two days in cramped barracks before a freight train set off on the 350-mile journey to Buchenwald, the camp near Weimar where the memoir ends.
Q 19On the roofless wagon ride to Buchenwald in Night, what is the only water the prisoners get?
Falling snow
Falling snow was all they had to drink across ten days and nights in open wagons; Night gives the journey only a few pages, part of the 'minimalist construction' critic Ruth Franklin credits for its power.
Q 20What does Rabbi Eliahou's son do on Night's evacuation march that Eliezer prays never to repeat?
Runs ahead, leaving his father behind
Runs ahead, leaving his father behind: the son had seen his father limping and let the distance grow, and Eliezer asks God, in whom he says he no longer believes, for strength never to do the same.
Sealed completes the line that critic Ellen Fine says carries Night's main themes — the death of God and innocence, and the 'dissolution of self' — beginning 'Never shall I forget that night'.
Q 24Wiesel's father died in Buchenwald in January 1945; Night notes he missed liberation by how long?
Three months
Three months separated his death, which the memoir dates to the morning of 29 January, from the arrival of the US Army's 6th Armored Division on 11 April 1945.
Q 25Moved to Buchenwald's children's block after his father's death, Night's Eliezer dreams of what?
Soup
Soup is all he dreams of among the 600 boys of the block, Night says; with his father gone, a narrative that had been about not losing him moves in a few pages to liberation and the mirror.
Q 26Night's last pages: who seizes Buchenwald on 11 April 1945, the day the Americans arrive?
Prisoners' own resistance
Prisoners' own resistance took the camp with 20,000 inmates still inside, six days after an order to move them out; an American tank and the 6th Armored Division reached the gates at six that evening.
Q 27Until the move to Buchenwald, Wiesel later admitted, his main reason for trying to survive was what?
Knowing his father was still alive
Knowing his father was still alive kept him going — 'I knew that if I died, he would die', he told Oprah Winfrey — and Night's later chapters turn on the son becoming the father's caregiver.
Q 28Which courtroom word did Wiesel use for Night, a book scholars struggle to read as plain record?
Deposition
Deposition was his word, yet critics have labelled Night everything from 'autobiographical novel' to 'memoir-novel', and Ruth Franklin argues its power came at the cost of literal truth.
Q 29Where, within Sighet's larger ghetto, does Night place the corner house of Eliezer's family?
Serpent Street
Serpent Street was inside the bigger of two ghettos, so the family stayed in its own house with the windows on the non-ghetto side boarded up — until a move to the smaller ghetto before deportation.
Q 30What does the title of Wiesel's 1956 original, Un di velt hot geshvign, mean in English?
And the World Remained Silent
And the World Remained Silent was the Yiddish title, and the 1954 manuscript behind it was an angry historical account; critic Ruth Franklin says the pruning into French turned it into a work of art.