Night by Elie Wiesel Nobody wants to read such a morbid book as Night. There isn’t anybody (other than the Nazis and Neo-Nazis) who enjoys reading about things like the tortures, the starvation, and the beatings that people went through in the concentration camps. Night is a horrible tale of murder and of man’s inhumanity towards man. We must, however, read these kinds of books regardless. It is an indefinitely depressing subject, but because of its truthfulness and genuine historic value, it is a story that we must learn, simply because it is important never to forget. As Robert McAfee Brown states in the preface of the memoir “the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear- the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide.” Elie Wiesel has paid much attention to an inner desire and need to serve humanity by illuminating the hate-darkened past. Night is a horrifying account of a Nazi death camp that turns Elie Wiesel from a young Jewish boy into a distressed and grief-stricken witness to the death of his family, the death of his friends, even the death of his own innocence and his faith in G-d. He saw his family, friends and fellow Jews first severely degraded and then sadistically murdered. He enters the camp a child and leaves a man. At the book’s end, Elie bears little resemblance to the teenage boy who left Sighet almost a year earlier. Night is a memoir exquisitely written. Wiesel’s eloquence makes his descriptions seem terrifyingly real and repulsive. It is a book about what the Holocaust did, not just to the Jews, but to humanity. People all over the world found themselves affected by this atrocious act. Even today, there are a number of survivors who are tormented by their experience every day of their lives. The Wiesel’s have, throughout the novel, several opportunities to escape Sighet as well as the camp itself, but they are stubborn in their beliefs and refuse to listen to the warnings. Moshe the Beadle, Elie’s mentor at the beginning of the novel, while Elie is still a deeply religious young man, manages to escape the Gestapo in Poland. He returns to Sighet to deliver his message and to try to warn people of the pending situation. The villagers, however, believe Moshe has lost his mind, find... ... middle of paper ... ...e” was Elie’s body, but it had not only lost so many pounds to make him look like a walking skeleton, but he had been robbed of its soul as well. This is similar to the loss suffered by people all over the world. Although several survivors are still alive physically, their mind and spirit have long been dead, or at least a large part of it. Recovering his spirit, his personality, even his faith, is, when he is released, is the most difficult obstacle for Elie to overcome. Night tells the story of innocent victims. It is the story of people who were destroyed simply because they were Jews. These people had done nothing and yet were tortured, degraded and liquidated for no other reason other than their faith in the Jewish religion and their semitic “racial inferiority”. Wiesel is a witness to all the horrible things, and by reading his memoir we too, become witnesses. He is a spokesperson for all those who cannot bear to speak and to pass the message on to us, the next generation. We are the ones who are obliged to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. We must take advantage of his eloquence and its importance, which is never to forget, in order never to let this happen again.
Elie’s loss of innocence and childhood lifestyle is very pronounced within the book, Night. This book, written by the main character, Elie Wiesel, tells the readers about the experiences of Mr. Wiesel during the Holocaust. The book starts off by describing Elie’s life in his hometown, Sighet, with his family and friends. As fascism takes over Hungary, Elie and his family are sent north, to Auschwitz concentration camp. Elie stays with his father and speaks of his life during this time. Later, after many stories of the horrors and dehumanizing acts of the camp, Elie and his father make the treacherous march towards Gliewitz. Then they are hauled to Buchenwald by way of cattle cars in extremely deplorable conditions, even by Holocaust standards. The book ends as Elie’s father is now dead and the American army has liberated them. As Elie is recovering in the hospital he gazes at himself in a mirror, he subtly notes he much he has changed. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie loses his innocence and demeanour because he was traumatized by what he saw in the camps, his loss of faith in a God who stood idly by while his people suffered, and becoming selfish as he is forced to become selfish in the death camps to survive.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
Night by Elie Wiesel was a memoir on one of the worst things to happen in human history, the Holocaust. A terrible time where the Nazi German empire started to take control of eastern Europe during WWII. This book tells of the terrible things that happened to the many Jewish people of that time. This time could easily change grown men, and just as easily a boy of 13. Elie’s relationship with God and his father have been changed forever thanks to the many atrocities committed at that time.
Some of the most fabled stories of our time come from individuals overcoming impossible odds and surviving horrific situations. This is prevalent throughout the Holocaust. People are fascinated with this event in history because the survivors had to overcome immense odds. One, of many, of the more famous stories about the Holocaust is Night by Elie Wiesel. Through this medium, Wiesel still manages to capture the horrors of the camps, despite the reader already knowing the story.
Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel, a young Jewish boy, who tells of his experiences during the Holocaust. Elie is a deeply religious boy whose favorite activities are studying the Talmud and spending time at the Temple with his spiritual mentor, Moshe the Beadle. At an early age, Elie has a naive, yet strong faith in God. But this faith is tested when the Nazi's moves him from his small town.
The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time of life” and through his journey into night he can’t see the “light” at the end of the tunnel, only continuous dread and darkness. Night is a memoir that is written in the style of a bildungsroman, a loss of innocence and a sad coming of age. This memoir reveals how Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) gradually loses his faith and his relationships with both his father (dad), and his Father (God). Sickened by the torment he must endure, Wiesel questions if God really exists, “Why, but why should I bless him? Because he in his great might, had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? (67). Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel’s faith is not permanently shattered. Although after his father dies, his faith in god and religion is shaken to the core, and arguably gone. Wiesel, along with most prisoners, lose their faith in God. Wiesel’s loss of religion becomes the loss of identity, humanity, selfishness, and decency.
When people are placed in difficult, desolate situations, they often change in a substantial way. In Night by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist, Elie, is sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he undergoes many devastating experiences. Due to these traumatic events, Elie changes drastically, losing his passion in God, becoming disconnected with his father, and maturing when it matters most.
Elie Wiesel’s novel ‘Night’ is a tragic, deeply poignant and heart-wrenching autobiographical account of his life in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. A traumatized survivor of the Buchenwald camp, through this novel expresses his anguish about the brutal incarceration and genocide that took place there and in numerous other camps in Europe during Hitler’s rule. However, what Elie Wiesel attributes as one of the main factors that allowed the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to continue their operations unabatedly was the all pervasive ‘silence’ which they encountered during their assault on the Jewish community. The author himself lived with the knowledge of these crimes against humanity in anguish and silence for
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
After 10 years of a personally vowed silence post liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp, Elie Wiesel wrote the autobiographical novel Night to tell his horrific story. A graphic novel of his time in several concentration camps, Wiesel takes but only 90 pages to write how he became an orphan during the Holocaust. After reading the novel, there are several aspects that shed light on other relevant themes of the time, undoubtedly leading to conflicting likes and dislikes regarding the novel. Collectively, Night is a riveting novel that needs recognition of its story, underlying themes and an exhibition of the real Holocaust from a Jewish first person point of view.
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize men and cause them to revert to basic instincts. Wiesel and his peers devolve from civilized human beings to savage animals during the course of Night.
The ground is frozen, parents sob over their children, stomachs growl, stiff bodies huddle together to stay slightly warm. This was a recurrent scene during World War II. Night is a literary memoir of Elie Wiesel’s tenure in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel created a character reminiscent of himself with Eliezer. Eliezer experienced cruelty, stress, fear, and inhumanity at a very young age, fifteen. Through this, he struggled to maintain his Jewish faith, survive with his father, and endure the hardships placed on his body and mind.
The book “Night” helped me understand the Holocaust much better. The writer, Elie Wiesel, did a great job describing his experiences and what he had to go through. In a way I feel bad that Elie had to go through all of these and then have to go back and think about all of it to be able to make a book. As the author said: “I don’t know how I survived, I did nothing to save myself.” Miracles happen but Elie didn’t think that what happened to him was a miracle.
Night is an autobiography by a man named Eliezer Wiesel. The autobiography is a quite disturbing record of Elie’s childhood in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald during world war two. While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated by a boy named Eliezer who represents Elie, but details set apart the character Eliezer from the real life Elie. For instance, Eliezer wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Elie actually wounded his knee. Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost impossibly painful for a survivor to write about his Holocaust experience, and the mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel to distance himself somewhat from the experience, to look in from the outside.