Faith is tough to keep strong, especially because it is difficult to trust something you cannot see. In the nonfiction historical account “Night,” Elie Wiesel discusses what he went through in the tragic tale of the German concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buna, and Gleiwitz. Throughout this novel, one defining theme shown through the rest. No matter how devout one is, most will doubt their god in the face of such atrocities. The best example we have is from Elie himself, especially right after entering the first camp, when he was walking toward the flames, expecting to die. As he was being forced to march towards the flames, his mind wandered to places it had never been before. Elie stated that “For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank him for? It can be understood than in that moment, Elie was losing his mentality. Even so, he still had the sense of loneliness that most would have in that situation. Elie was hopeless, wondering where his God was, and why he was being silent. Elie never doubted his belief in god, he doubted that the god was not his god, that the god was a terrible ruler. It is important to remember that this is extremely early in Wiesel’s experience with the concentration camps, and his piousness is already decreasing. This is crucial for the understanding of this timeline in Elie’s faith. Also close to the beginning of the novel, but shortly after the first faith ordeal, Elie says a few poetic lines that are famous in the book. He recites “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget
Throughout his recollections, it is clear that Elie has a constant struggle with his belief in God. Prior to Auschwitz, Elie was motivated, even eager to learn about Jewish mysticism. Yet, after he had been exposed to the reality of the concentration camps, Elie began to question God. According to Elie, God “caused thousands of children to burn...He kept six crematoria working day and night...He created Auschwitz, Birkenau, [and] Buna”(67). Elie could not believe the atrocities going on around him. He could not believe that the God he followed tolerated such things. During times of sorrow, when everyone was praying and sanctifying His name, Elie no longer wanted to praise the Lord; he was at the point of giving up. The fact that the “Terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent”(33) caused Elie to lose hope and faith. When one cho...
Due to the atrocities of the concentration camps, Elie lost his faith in God. Early on in the story, Elie used to leap over ancient temples and study the Kabbalah. In his old town, he used to complain to Moishe the Beadle “ I told him how unhappy I was not to able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar.”(Wiesel,5) This shows him complaining about not having a teacher. But as he started to go through the camps, he saw what was going on and started to
Before Elie’s hometown got invaded, he was extremely religious. He used to pray and feel the presence of God all around him causing him to shed tears of joy and even began
One minute Elie Wiesel was sitting at home enjoying time with his family then, all of as sudden, he was forced out of his own home and on his was to a death camp with tons of other people just like him. What was he going to do in order to survive? How would he overcome the physical and mental challenges that this horrible death camp will bring? In the beginning of the novel, Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie turned to studying the Kabbalah and studying his God. Throughout the novel, we see parts where Elie’s faith begins to slip and he questions why, why is God doing this to him and others in the Auschwitz camp. The author wants his readers to see the changes the camp on his religious beliefs. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses tone, diction, and repetition to illustrate the loss of faith in Elie.
Elie spent the first thirteen years of his life as a devout Jew and grew up as the son of a pillar of the religious community in his town, yet we witness a stark change in his religious beliefs as he goes through this experience of the Holocaust. An obvious sign of Elie’s loss of religion is how he does not observe any Jewish holidays that require fasting, choosing instead to eat his meal for energy. It progresses further when he forgets to say Kaddish for Akiba Drumer, a man in his block who got sent to his death. Elie struggles with his perception of God throughout the book, as shown when he refuses to ask forgiveness for his sins. Instead, he considers himself “the accuser, God the accused.” Although Elie never completely loses his faith, he does cease to have faith in God’s ability to be completely just. This represents a major loss in Elie’s
In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, religion plays an important role in the lives of the characters. As the story progresses, the characters all react to their situations with varying degrees of questioning their faith. Their reactions range from turning their back on religion completely to clinging to it in an effort to explain what is happening around them. Ultimately, this book shows that religion, although an important part of many people’s lives, can never explain why bad (or even good) things happen to people.
Elie was a man of faith, who prayed daily. From his perspective, he was abandoned by his God, Yahweh. Elie wrote “Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria burning day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death?” (67). Elie is thinking this, while a prayer is said at the Appelplatz, praising on Yahweh, Rosh Hashanah. In
In the final moments of Night, Elie has been broken down to only the most basic ideas of humanity; survival in it of itself has become the only thing left for him to cling to. After the chain of unfortunate events that led to his newfound solitude after his father’s abrupt death, Elie “thought only to eat. [He] thought not of [his] father, or [his] mother” (113). He was consumed with the ideas of survival, so he repeatedly only expressed his ideas of gluttony rather than taking the time to consider what happened to his family. The stress of survival allocated all of Elie’s energy to that cause alone. Other humanistic feelings like remorse, love, and faith were outcast when they seemed completely unimportant to his now sole goal of survival. The fading of his emotions was not sudden mishap though; he had been worn away with time. Faith was one of the most prominent key elements in Elie’s will to continue, but it faded through constant. During the hanging of a young boy Elie heard a man call to the crowd pleading, “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64). It snapped Elie’s resolve. From this point on, he brought up and questioned his faith on a regular basis. Afterwards, most other traits disappeared like steam after a fire is extinguished. Alone in the wet embers the will to survive kept burning throughout the heart ache. When all else is lost, humans try to survive for no reason other than to survive, and Wiesel did survive. He survived with mental scars that persisted the ten long years of his silence. Even now after his suffering has, Elie continues to constantly repeat the word never throughout his writing. To write his memoir he was forced to reopen the lacerations the strains of survival left inside his brain. He strongly proclaims, “Never shall I forget that night...Never shall I forget the smoke...Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the
As the book progresses Elie’s childlike innocence starts to dissipate as shown by, “In front of us, those flames. In the air, the smells of burning flesh. It must have been around midnight. We had arrived. In Birkenau.” (28). As that night went on the first horrors of Birkenau came alive to him. It was literally like walking through the burning inferno people called hell. That was the moment when innocence became a thing unheard to Elie and all around him in the concentration camp. The night he asked his father “when will it be our turn” (18) at that lonely night in the ghetto was the first time he began to understand the depth of the situation he was in. Then the real blow to his innocence came when he is standing at the fire pit and saying the Jewish death rights words“Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba…” m...
Eliezer loses faith in god. He struggles physically and mentally for life and no longer believes there is a god. "Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to dust..."(pg 32). Elie worked hard to save himself and asks god many times to help him and take him out of his misery. "Why should I bless his name? The eternal, lord of the universe, the all-powerful and terrible was silent..."(pg 31). Eliezer is confused, because he does not know why the Germans would kill his face, and does not know why god could let such a thing happen. "I did not deny god's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice..."(pg 42). These conditions gave him confidence, and courage to live.
In night Elie is thrust into to situations that cause him to question his faith. One literary device that describes this is repetition.Repetition is starting a sentence with the first same few words to express how people are feeling and have you better understand the situation. “Never shall i forget the smoke that consumed my faith (34). Never shall I forget the moments that murdered my god and turned my dreams into ashes (34). These two quotes clearly show a loss in faith in Elie using repetition. The first quote is basically saying all of the carnage and hardships he faces the first night made him lose some of his faith. A few
In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is an extremely passionate and devout Jew, but as the story progresses, Elie sees horrendous things in the concentration camps, and as a result, he slowly loses his faith. Elie displays his extreme devotion in the beginning stages of the memoir when he states, “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry” (Wiesel 4). Elie is clearly very fond of learning more about his religion and connecting to God in a spiritual way. Furthermore, Elie is only thirteen years old, so when he says he cries because he feels the need to cry, he is exhibiting incredible passion. Elie reveals signs of change and begins to lose his faith in God just a few moments after arriving at the concentration camp when he says, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (Wiesel 34). Elie exclaims that he cannot worship God anymore due to the awful things he has seen at Auschwitz. He does not want to believe in the being that could have allowed these awful events to happen. This is a completely different Elie from the loving and caring Elie in the ghetto. Elie also uses rep...
One wouldn’t expect faith, or the idea of it, to be as volatile as it was in chapter five of Night. This chapter highlighted two examples of losing faith in G-d, but while that loss left Elie Wiesel without the ability to believe in anything, it brought someone he described as a faceless neighbor to devote all his faith entirely to one man: Adolf Hitler.
In 1986, Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a voice for the sufferings of both the Jewish people, and victims of any oppression. His Holocaust experiences sparked something inside of him that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise. Despite all of the brutality and suffering, Elie learned positive lessons throughout his time in Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
The reader meets Elie as a Jew living in a little town in Transylvania, where he is intently studying his faith under the direction of a poor homeless man. As a foreshadowing of the role that God will play in the rest of Elie’s journey through the Holocaust, the story opens with Elie’s teacher telling him: “Man questions God and God answers. But we don’t understand his answers” (2). This is a concept that Elie struggles with throughout the book, from when his life is still happy and peaceful until it has been left in disarray.