Night and how to get students to make a meaningful connection

I taught Night by Elie Wiesel last school year and I may teach it again this coming school year. I found Night to be an excellent novel to get students to begin to develop an internal dialogue about social justice and each person’s responsibility. One webquest search I found to be incredibly useful in giving the students an idea of how to connect to the images of the horrific events of the holocaust is http://cte.jhu.edu/techacademy/web/2000/baczkowski/intro.htm. There the students created powerful poetry designed to ensure that their friends do not forget the horrors of the holocaust. Each student’s poem has hyperlinked visual images which fills the senses of the reader. The students ultimate goal was to explain why the book by Elie Wiesel is tilted Night.
Although my students struggled somewhat with Night (that is, they failed to make immediate connections), once we began to make real life connections and once we began to talk about social justice they began to understand the seriousness of the situation. I like the lesson in the webquest mentioned above since it has students create their own interpretive visual creative response.