Reflection Of Night By Elie Wiesel

The book Night, by Elie Wiesel, examines the life of a Jewish teenage boy during 20th century fascism in Hungary – a story based on his own experiences. Wiesel begins his book by introducing us to Moshe the Beadle through the main characters – Eliezer – eyes. It is here that we find out Moshe the Beadle was deported along with other foreign Jews and later returned sharing his encounter with the Gestapo when they took charge of his train when it reach Poland. The stories he shared about the Gestapo leading everyone into the woods where they were shot and killed were brushed off by others and thought of as the story of a lunatic. In the pages that follow, the readers are brought into the world of Eliezer after the spring of 1944 when the Nazi’s invade and occupy Hungary. Throughout the book we are able to see that Wiesel’s main purpose for sharing his story was to not stay silent like the rest of the world did at the time. In his preface he shared his belief that someone would need to bear
The choice to use this first person account establishes an intimate, descriptive, and almost relatable picture of life under Nazi rule. In addition to this first person point of view, Wiesel’s tone of writing shows great honesty. Rather than paint himself in an even more favorable light, he shares and describes moments that bring about feelings of guilt in himself. For example he doesn’t hide the fact that he didn’t defend his father from the SS officer that smashed his father’s head. He shares that “I left him alone in the clutches of death. Worse: I was angry with him for having been noisy, for having cried, for provoking the wrath of the SS”. The combination of Eliezer’s perspective and the honest tone shows readers almost firsthand how the situation influenced the behavior of himself and other prisoners at the