Elie Wiesel’ Night/Auschwitz Presentation The book that I choose to read for our WWII project is by Elie Wiesel, and is called Night.  Night is a true story about Elie and his family being sent to a concentration camp called Auschwitz where Elie is forced to suffer with hundreds of thousands of Jews for simply being Jewish.  Night is an account of Elie’s life in Auschwitz.  It tells you the horrific truth that it is difficult to find online. My diorama is a scene at Auschwitz minutes after the train ride.  Females were sent one direction males the other.  No exceptions.  If you tried to go to the other gender’s side to stay with your family, you would be shot.  Families were torn apart.  People were sent either to the male camp, or the female camp, and if you didn’t comply, you would be dead in mere seconds.I choose to research Auschwitz-Birkenau because in Night, Elie is sent to Auschwitz after a train ride, and must leave his sisters and mother.  Auschwitz was a terrible place that never should have existed.  Auschwitz’s construction began in April of 1940 and opened in May of 1940, so it only took them one month from the time that they started building to the time that people began arriving.  The first people that were sent to Auschwitz were people that were political prisoners, which means people that used to be people with power like our president, and were against the Nazis, but later during WWII Adolf Hitler decided isolating the Jews in ghettos was not enough.  He decided that he must go with the “Final Solution” which was making the race of Jews go completely extinct by sending them to concentration camps like Auschwitz.  One of the main reasons that Auschwitz became the most feared concentration camp is because it was a center of the road and railroad in Poland so the Nazis were able to easily make it a concentration camp and be able to send millions of Jews there.  Only 1,050 of the 7,000 people who worked at Auschwitz were later convicted for war crimes, and out of the 1,050 only those that were running Auschwitz were later convicted of war crimes.  Only 135,000 out of the 1,095,000 people sent to Auschwitz survived.  People didn’t fight back when going into the gas chambers because they were told that they were simply going to have a disinfecting shower.  Most of the remaining prisoners in 1945 were killed in the death march where everyone that wasn’t currently dying in the hospital was forced to run for 39 miles in a row without stopping because the Nazis wanted to kill them before the Soviet Union arrived.  Auschwitz was a very powerful and moving topic to research, as well as Night a book to read.