Night Timeline

Today we started the introduction to the last book we'll be reading this semester (yay!). But before that, Mr. Hannah and I came around to check your index cards that you were supposed to finish over the weekend. For those of you who completed your index cards, great work. You'll be on track for the rest of the week. For those of you who didn't, I can't say the same. Please (and really, I'm begging) finish your index cards tonight. You won't get credit for completing them because they were due today, but it'll put you at the same speed as everyone else when we jump back to the research paper tomorrow. If you don't, you'll be put in the back of the room and have to finish them then, and then miss out on the most difficult part of the research paper where you're going to need me and Mr. Hannah's help the most. Please don't put yourself at a disadvantage already. Get the easy work done now so you can spend class time on the hard stuff.

As for our introduction to Night, this will be the most emotional books we read all year. In saying so, this isn't a book that you're going to annotate greatly. This book is more for marginal comments on the side as you read, rather than highlighting metaphors or similes. As such, most of the reading of this book will be done at home. For some of you, you may need to put the book down and come back to it because you may become overwhelmed. Mr. Hannah and I feel the best way to do this will be for you to read the book at your own pace, at home, on your own time. We will set markers along the way of which page you need to read up to on what day, but the reading will be done on your own.

Here's what we learned from the timeline:

--This book is a memoir, different from an autobiography which is a nonfiction book about your whole life rather than about one specific experience.
--This book is a Holocaust survivor book about the main character's (Elie Wiesel) experience in a concentration camp during WWII in Nazi Germany.
--After WWI, Germany was left with no money and no where to go. Hitler came up as confident man with lots of ideas about how to better the country. Germany got behind him and elected him "president" of Germany.
--Germany created ghettos, which were walled-off sections of a city where Jews were contained. (Picture Below)

--Germany began "The Final Solution"--a plan to murder all Jews.
--Elie and his family were from Hungary. Hungary wasn't invaded by Germany until 1944, about a year before the war ended. The reason Hungary wasn't invaded sooner was because Hungary was on Germany's good side, until they realized Germany would lose the war and then they bailed on Germany. Once Germany found out Hungary wasn't going to help them anymore, Germnay went after Hungary and took them over in a little less than a week. (Map Below)

 --Concentration camps were set up all over Germany. Concentration camps are camps where civilians, prisoners of war, criminals, etc., are put to work under very harsh conditions. Now remember, concentration camps were not just during the Holocaust, and not solely for Jews. Many gypsies, homosexuals, and other frowned-upon people were put there as well. (Picture Below)

--Elie's story is about his experience in one of these concentration camps. He was taken when he was only 15. Here's a picture of Elie before, and after. Notice how starved these prisoners were and how poor and unclean their living conditions were. 

This will be a very intense read with lots of intense discussions. I don't mean to scare you with all these intense images, but we will be looking at and watching some film of this time period, and some of it is uncomfortable to watch. However, it's important that we understand and talk about this incredible time period in our world history instead of silencing it.

As for your projects, we pushed back the due date by a day. However, please do not take this as an opportunity to procrastinate this one more day. Get done whatever you were going to get done tonight, and then run it by me and Mr. Hannah tomorrow. We'll be here to help.

DEETS
In-class:
--Index Cards Check
--Night Timeline
--Group Project Q&A
--Morphology Quiz

HW:
--Index Cards (if you failed to finish them)
--Group Project due Wednesday
--Read pgs.1-23 of Night by Friday