The night is silent, whispers of crickets and the dazzling of stars glimmer throughout the valley as the American clutches to his small pouch of water. He hides behind a rock and waits for the Germans to creep up and shout words that he himself couldn't even understand. A curl from his dark brown hair falls onto his face as he licks his lips nervously and looks around for any sign of life. “Auschwitz-birkenau.” he mutters, “Auschwitz-birkenau” he repeats this phrase and continues to walk around for a place to rest. The trees above his head cast a shadow on him as he tries to see his hand that was certainly inches away from his face, this thought was calming but at the same time unnerving. “No one can see me…” he mutters, “But I can't see anything …show more content…
Aventino’s eyes widen and beads of sweat drip from his hair onto the leaves below him. His heart beats out of his chest and he could feel a strong urge to vomit. Just then, as he looks over the ditch to the soldiers, one shines his light up at the ditch and stands up straight as if he's surprised “Hier drüben! Ich glaube, ich fand ihn !” (Over here! I think I found him!) Says the soldier as he rushes towards the ditch. Aventino’s eyes widen as he freezes in place, His ears almost seemed to perk up slightly in alert and he skims his surroundings for any possible way out. His body goes limp as he feels the air suffocating and gripping his every move. His spine tenses up with despair and desperation as what was to come. “Cold,” he thinks to himself “I'm so cold.” He shivers and crawls towards the body, he finds a muddy corner of the ditch and hides in it. In a desperate attempt to hide he begins to take the dirt and rub it on him to try to blend in. He then freezes when he hears a loud crunch from behind him. Aventino slowly turns to meet eyes with a German soldier, the German had light blond hair with blue piercing eyes that seemed to light up the darkness surrounding him. It only took a few minutes to notice that the German wasn't looking at him, he was looking at the body. Aventino stares at the man in both terror,shock, and most of all confusion. …show more content…
He slowly makes his way up to the body, mud sloshing between his fingers and under his nails as he’s greeted by the scent of decay. He brushes away more of the pine needles from the body's face and looks more at the man. He mutters, “We didn't really get a chance to meet did we no-” his words are interrupted by the striking image of a familiar face, his face. Aventino stumbles back and into the mud that surrounds him with a shriek “I- Im-” Memories come crashing back to him, memories of the sirens, the ditch, the spike that impaled him, the cold and loneliness that soon followed, and the harsh reality that he, on this day would die lonely and afraid. Unaware of what would happen in death. The mud around Aventino slithers up his arms slowly as he could do nothing but look at himself and watch his whole world crumble before him. Tears fall down his cheeks as he realises that he was being pulled underground. He was sinking. Aventino shrieks as a cry of help for his own enemies to come and same him, but it was to no avail. Soon the mud filled his lungs and muffled his desperate cries for help. He closes his
The tragedies of the holocaust forever altered history. One of the most detailed accounts of the horrific events from the Nazi regime comes from Elie Wiesel’s Night. He describes his traumatic experiences in German concentration camps, mainly Buchenwald, and engages his readers from a victim’s point of view. He bravely shares the grotesque visions that are permanently ingrained in his mind. His autobiography gives readers vivid, unforgettable, and shocking images of the past. It is beneficial that Wiesel published this, if he had not the world might not have known the extent of the Nazis reign. He exposes the cruelty of man, and the misuse of power. Through a lifetime of tragedy, Elie Wiesel struggled internally to resurrect his religious beliefs as well as his hatred for the human race. He shares these emotions to the world through Night.
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.
The Holocaust is known to be one the World's greatest catastrophes. Many people know about it, but very few know how life was like in the concentration camps. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel utilizes figurative language like metaphors, irony, foreshadowing, and unique sentence structures, to convey and compare how life during the Holocaust was ghastly, full of lies and regret, and how it was like "one long night, seven times cursed"(25).
Santilli explains horror as something beyond death: a loss of freedom and control. As he continues to say, “What remains after death is the corpse itself, an ineluctable remainder of the act, representing the triumph of being over the subject’s free negation” (183). The act of the killing will always be present even after a while, Richard knows how the other men ended up, hanging dead yet he takes on the mystery.
When the author of Night, Elie Wiesel, arrives at Auschwitz, the Jewish people around him, the Germans, and himself have yet to lose their humanity. Throughout the Holocaust, which is an infamous genocide that imprisoned many Jewish people at concentration camps, it is clear that the horrors that took place here have internally affected all who were involved by slowly dehumanizing them. To be dehumanized means to lose the qualities of a human, and that is exactly what happened to both the Germans and the Jewish prisoners. Wiesel has lived on from this atrocious event to establish the dehumanization of all those involved through his use of animal imagery in his memoir Night to advance the theme that violence dehumanizes both the perpetrator and the victim.
Authors sometimes refer to their past experiences to help cope with the exposure to these traumatic events. In his novel Night, Elie Wiesel recalls the devastating and horrendous events of the Holocaust, one of the world’s highest points for man’s inhumanity towards man, brutality, and cruel treatment, specifically towards the Jewish Religion. His account takes place from 1944-1945 in Germany while beginning at the height of the Holocaust and ending with the last years of World War II. The reader will discover through this novel that cruelty is exemplified all throughout Wiesel's, along with the other nine million Jews’, experiences in the inhumane concentration camps that are sometimes referred to as “death factories.”
The mood of Night is harder to interpret. Many different responses have occurred in readers after their perusal of this novel. Those that doubt the stories of the holocaust’s reality see Night as lies and propaganda designed to further the myth of the holocaust. Yet, for those people believing in the reality, the feelings proffered by the book are quite different. Many feel outrage at the extent of human maliciousness towards other humans. Others experience pity for the loss of family, friends, and self that is felt by the holocaust victims. Some encounter disgust as the realization occurs that if any one opportunity had been utilized the horror could of been avoided. Those missed moments such as fleeing when first warned by Moshe the Beadle, or unblocking the window when the Hungarian officer had come to warn them, would have saved lives and pain.
“The Perils of Indifference” In April, 1945, Elie Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp after struggling with hunger, beatings, losing his entire family, and narrowly escaping death himself. He at first remained silent about his experiences, because it was too hard to relive them. However, eventually he spoke up, knowing it was his duty not to let the world forget the tragedies resulting from their silence. He wrote Night, a memoir of his and his family’s experience, and began using his freedom to spread the word about what had happened and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
Untouched and unhindered, he continued on a path, not yet discovered, towards the unknowing Prince Prospero. Although he had a slow pace, he made an unexplainable distance in a small amount of time. Some masqueraded man from the retreating group grew enraged and curious of this mysterious man. He ran up to the figure and placed a hand on his mask with the intent to tear it off of the ghostly man. The moment he laid his hand upon the mask, he screamed in agony and pain. Then, unable to pull his hand or the mask free, his fate was sealed. His scream withered away along with his final breath, as he turned old and crumpled onto the lustrous floor in a pile of black ash. Silence and absolute stillness filled the room before a wine glass, half full of a red drink, descended from the whitley g...
When enduring great suffering, people are not capable of distinguishing right from wrong. In Night, one sees that the victims of the Holocaust will do anything to survive. Elie Wiesel relives the horror when he and many more fell prey to the Nazis and when they did unforgivable things to live.
On the first night in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Wiesel feels his life beginning to change forever, saying “never shall i forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed” (34). Although he has only been in the camp one day, he feels broken and hopeless. Everything in his life has changed and he will never be the same again. Additionally, his perception of time becomes very skewed due to the hard labor and anguish he endures. He cannot remember how long he had been away from home, saying “so many events had taken place in just a few hours that I had completely lost all notion of time. When had we left our homes? And the ghetto? And the train? Only a week? One single night?” (37). Because of the trauma that he had experienced in such a short period of time, Wiesel could not tell how long he had been at the camp. This skewed perception of time adds to the dreariness and anguish Wiesel feels throughout the
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
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.
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that