A story of a young boy and his father as they are stolen from their home in Transylvania and taken through the most brutal event in human history describes the setting. This boy not only survived the tragedy, but went on to produce literature, in order to better educate society on the truth of the Holocaust. In Night, the author, Elie Wiesel, uses imagery, diction, and foreshadowing to describe and define the inhumanity he experienced during the Holocaust. Imagery is one of the most effective methods Wiesel used in his biography to portray forms of inhumanity. “Not far from us, flames, huge flames were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there… small children. Babies” (32). In this case, Elie does not wish to live if his eyes were telling the truth. This alone refers to extreme cruelty, describing the inhumanity in which the suppressed races endured inside the many concentration camps. Following several weeks at work in an electrical-fittings factory, Elie quotes a hanging which he remembers quite well. “He was a young boy from Warsaw… The Lagerälteste …show more content…
“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me never left me” (115). It is important to note what the author tries to get at here. Every time he sees himself, he remembers that he had died. The experiences, the brutality, the inhumanity feel as if he should have been killed. Another example of this is when he first enters Auschwitz. “The beloved objects we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and with them, finally, our illusions.” (29). This quote not only foreshadows a loss of hope and a near end, but the words Wiesel uses in this paragraph really are responsible for its insinuation. He tells readers that, at this point, nothing they had brought with them could keep them from the truth; the truth they were about to
He is taken to a hospital in order to treat his malnutrition, wounds, and disease. After weeks of constant care, doctors cleared Wiesel and he was able to look at himself in a mirror for the first time in a few years. As he stares at himself in disbelief, he says, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.” (115). Once again, the author was able to incorporate a metaphor that describes his body’s condition as it did not strictly resemble a corpse. This metaphor also symbolizes the mental, physical, and spiritual “death” that Elie has gone through during the story. The reader is not told whether Wiesel regained his faith in God, but is led to believe that he was able to survive based on his relentless love for his
Wiesel suggests that,“Toward five o’clock in the morning, we were driven out of the barracks. The Kapos beat us once more, but I ceased to feel any pain from their blows.” (27) This quote reveals that the officers did not care what time of day it was if they felt like punishing the prisoners they did. Elie was at the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see and was punished. “A-7713! I came forward. A box! He ordered. They brought him a box. Lie down on it! On your stomach! I obeyed. Then I was aware of nothing but the strokes of the whip” (Wiesel 42). This quote shows the cruel punishment that Elie and other Jews endured in the Holocaust. The Nazi’s were cruel and inhumane to the Jews when it came to feeding them and clothing them during the cold winters. “Mountains of prison clothes. On we ran. As we passed, trousers, tunic, shirt, and socks were thrown at us”( Wiesel 27) “ Such outfits! Meir Katz, a giant, had a child’s trousers, and Stern, a think little chap, a tunic which completely swamped him” (Wiesel 27) This quote shows that the Nazi’s did not care if they got the right size shirt or pants or not they passed them out and you got what you
It is estimated that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. A survivor from the Holocaust wrote about his time during the Holocaust. Elie wrote a book about his time in a concentration camp. Elie wrote a book called Night. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses soup as a motif to demonstrate that your food is more important than your life, as shown in the book when the man crawls to the soup and dies, when you’re sick, you’re entitled to thicker soup, and the soup was Elie’s entire life.
It was the end of the war and he no longer has a family after he was relocated and wiesel is basically a walking corpse. “And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed.” was written in page 91 which clearly states that he no longer believed in God. Now the last piece of evidence to prove that he doesn't care for others anymore would by when his father left the land of the living. On page 112 Wiesel writes how he felt about his passing ‘And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have something like: Free at
Elie Wiesel had many challenges that he faced everyday that he was in the camps. The main challenge was obviously to survive the death camps through hard work. The Jews able to work basically had two choices. They either worked hard, or they were sent to the crematorium. Wiesel struggled to survive the starvation and abuse. A more important challenge was keeping himself mentally stable and keeping himself alive internally. The fascist knew how to break down a person not only physically, but mentally. There at the camp, he witnessed the death of his family, the death of his innocence. There he began to disbelieve in god. “Where is god? Where is He? someone behind me asked.”(Wiesel, 61) Many Jews began to lose hope. What they saw there was terrible. “They...
In conclusion, Wiesel loses his belief in God and religion by witnessing the murder of his people, and his family. Wiesel is symbolic of every survivor who experienced the dread of the Holocaust. Like most of the survivors, Wiesel wavered about religion and God, but completely lost it at the end of the Holocaust. For instance, my Great-Grandfather Ruben survived the Holocaust, but came out with a nonreligious way of life. In addition, it took Wiesel about ten years to write Night and he believes he has a moral obligation to, “try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory” (viii).
Towards the end of the story, Wiesel’s dad becomes extremely sick. During an attempt to find his father in a mob, he dreams that “[he] were relieved of this responsibility, [he] could use all [his] strength to fight for [his] own survival, to take care of [himself]…” (Wiesel 106). The ellipses showcased the confusion in his mind regarding his father’s situation. Wiesel’s implicit thought about his father regards him as a dead weight, and questions the need of nursing him. Although Wiesel hasn’t completely scrapped his relationship with his father, the doubt set the foundation for the subsequent sacrifice. Their experiences in the Holocaust only separated their relationship, rather than bringing them closer together. Wiesel showcases, through the use of ellipses, that the Jews became less gregarious after the harsh treatment imposed on them by the
Upon arrival at Berkenau-Auswitz, the men and women were separated. It was here that Elie saw his mother and sisters for the last time. With the advise of another prisoner, Elie and Mr. Wiesel, lied about both their ages and occupations in order to get into the same line of men. “The baton moved unremittingly sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.” (page 29) Happy to be with his father, Elie still did not know if he was in line for the prison or the crematory. The line marched up toward the fires, he could see little children and babies being tossed into the fire. The line moved on past another pit where adults were being burned. After seeing these tragic events, Elie could no longer sleep. He could not believe this was happening and nobody was doing anything to stop it.
In the novel, Night, a journey of a young boy who teetered between life and death for so long is told. The struggle he faced, the strive to survive, and the desire to remain by his father’s side are all difficulties he encountered. The holocaust was a horrifying time- millions were murdered because they were considered a subspecies slowing down the evolutionary processA time of misery and fear for people of the Jewish religion, Wiesel shares his experience during this petrifying time.
Six million perished in the flames, mass shootings and gas chambers of concentration camps during the Holocaust. This started when the Nazi party established a “Final Solution” that sought out to eradicate the inferior Jewish race from Germany and the world (“Holocaust”). A person cannot look at this event and see nothing except for the dark, evil side of human nature. However, if a person looks at the Holocaust from a survivor’s point of view, they can see the good side of human nature, especially if someone looks at it from Elie Wiesel’s perspective. Elie Wiesel and his family were Romanian Jews who were, unfortunately, swept into the Holocaust’s horrors. Elie managed to escape the Holocaust using tools of survival, including love for family and impassivity. He did not let being a victim of the Holocaust define him, so Elie moved on to become an inspirational figure that represented and spoke out for all of those who constantly suffer due to the oppressive aspects of society. No one could have predicted such an outcome that is Elie Wiesel’s life story in the face of catastrophe like the Holocaust.
Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, took the time to inform the world about his experiences as a prisoner of Auschwitz during the Holocaust in order for it to never happen again. Wiesel uses a language so unbearably painful yet so powerful to depict his on memories of the Holocaust in order to convey the horrors he managed to survive through. When the memoir begins, Elie Wiesel, a jewish teenager living in the town of Sighet, Transylvania is forced out of his home. Despite warnings from Moshe the Beadle about German prosecutions of Jews, Wiesel’s family and the other townspeople fail to flee the country before the German’s invade. As a result, the entire Jewish population is sent to concentration camps. There, in the Auschwitz death camp, Wiesel is separated from his mother and younger sister but remains with his father. As he struggles to survive against starvation, physical, emotional and spiritual abuse he also looses faith in God. As weeks and months pass, Wiesel battles a conflict between fighting to live for his father or letting him die, giving himself the best chance of survival. Over the course of the memoir, Wiesel’s father dies and he is left with a guilty conscience but a relieved heart because now he can just fend for himself and only himself. A few months later, the Allied soldiers free the lucky prisoners that are left. Although Wiesel survives the concentration camps, he leaves behind his own innocence and is forever haunted by the death and violence he had witnessed. Wiesel and the rest of the prisoners lived in fear every minute of every hour of every day and had to live in a place where there was not one single place that there was no danger of death. After reading Night and Wiesel’s acceptance speech of the Nobe...
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.
Mr. Wiesel had intended this book to describe a period of time in his life that had been dark and sorrowful. This novel is based on a survivor of the greatest Holocaust in history, Eliezer Wiesel and his journey of being a Jew in 1944. The journey had started in Sighet, Transylvania, where Elie spent his childhood. During the Second World War, Germans came to Elie and his family’s home town. They brought with them unnecessary evil and despair to mankind. Shortly after young Elie and thousands of other Jews were forced from their habitats and torn from their rights of being human. They were sent to different concentration camps. Elie and his family were sent to Auschwitz, a concentration and extermination camp. It would be the last time Elie sees his mother and little sister, Tzipora. The first sights of Auschwitz were terrifying. There were big flames coming from the burning of bodies and the crematoriums. The Jews had no idea of what to expect. They were not told what was about to happen to them. During the concentration camp, there was endless death and torture. The Jews were starved and were treated worse than cattle. The prisoners began to question their faith in God, wondering why God himself would
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.
In Night, Elie Wiesel uses various symbols in a manner to convey a deeper meaning through common objects. Wiesel, for example, conveys the symbol of fire to show the cruelty and the power of the Nazi’s during the Holocaust. He begins saying this in Section 2 when Madame Schachter envisions fire in the cattle train on the way to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This allows the reader to understand the issues that are soon to become relevant later in the novel. Also, Wiesel sees the symbol of a corpse when in Section 9, he looks into a mirror after being liberated from the concentration camps by the Allied forces, and in Section 4, when Elie sees the young boy hanging from the gallows in the Appelplatz. These two occurrences of the theme of corpses display Elie Wiesel’s...