Elie Wiesel's Night

Inked on the pages of Elie Wiesel’s Night is the recounting of him, a young Jewish boy, living through the mass genocide that was the Holocaust. The words written so eloquently are full of raw emotions depict his journey from a simple Jewish boy to a man who was forced to see the horrors of the world. Within this time period, between beatings and deaths, Wiesel finds himself questioning his all loving and powerful God. If his God loved His people, then why would He allow such a terrible thing to happen? Perhaps Wiesel felt abandoned by his God, helpless against the will of the Nazis as they took everything from him.
Truthfully, it was inevitable that Wiesel would find himself connected so deeply to his religious beliefs. “‘By day I studied the Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple’” (Wiesel 3), the

Within the next few years, Wiesel’s simple Jewish life is snatched from his clutch and never seen again, the first crack in the glass of his fragile being. His humanity stripped from him and his mother and sister Tzipora taken, Wiesel becomes jaded and angered with his God. He became an “accuser, God the accused” (Wiesel 68), he could no longer think or speak of God without a question to follow it.
One can feel powerful once he denounces his God. It is as if a veil is lifted and suddenly he can see. It is only then that he realizes that what he had seen before was simply obscured. “My eyes had opened and I was alone,..” (Wiesel 68) Wiesel had said, his faith lost in the midst of burning flesh and beaten Jews. He feels “like an observer, a stranger” (Wiesel 68) to the other Jews that continue to believe in God. When Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in which Jews fasted, had come Wiesel did not participate. He rebelled against Him and “no longer accepted God’s silence” (Wiesel