A Survivor Of The Holocaust In Elie Wiesel's Night

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Elie Wiesel born in Transylvania, on September 30, 1928. A survivor of the Holocaust, is a writer, orator, teacher and chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. The third of four children and the only son, Wiesel was educated in sacred Jewish texts. When he was 15, Wiesel was taken off with his family to the concentration camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz, where he remained until January 1945 when, along with thousands of other Jewish prisoners, he was moved to Buchenwald in a forced death march. Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945, by the United States army, but neither Wiesel's parents nor his younger sister survived. After the war Wiesel went to France where he completed secondary school, studied at the Sorbonne, and …show more content…

Throughout his other works, the Holocaust looms as the shadow, the central but unspoken mystery in the life of his protagonists. Even pre-Holocaust events are seen as warnings of impending doom. In Night he narrates his own experience as a young boy transported to Auschwitz where suffering and death shattered his faith in both God and humanity. Night is widely considered a classic of Holocaust literature.
Night was followed in 1961 by Dawn, the story of a young Holocaust survivor brought to work for the underground in pre-independence Israel. Young Elisha is ordered to execute a British Army officer in retaliation for the hanging of a young Jewish fighter. Through Elisha's ordeal, Wiesel describes the transformation of the Jewish people from defenseless victims into potential victimizers. The execution occurs at dawn, but the killing is an act of self-destruction with Elisha its ultimate victim.
The struggle between life and death continues to dominate Wiesel's third work of the trilogy, but in The Accident (Le Jour in French), published in 1962, God is not implicated in either life or death. The battle is waged within the protagonist, now a newspaper correspondent covering the United Nations, who is fighting for life after an accident. In these three early works Wiesel moved from a God-infused universe to a godless one. The titles of his books grow brighter as the presence of God becomes dimmer, yet the transition is never

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