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.
“Hitler won’t be able to do us any harm, even if he wants to.” So begins the book, Night, by Elie Wiesel an autobiographical work about Elie’s struggle to survive the Holocaust while living at multiple concentration camps. Beginning at age 15, Elie Wiesel moves from a young man questioning the accounts of German hatred, to becoming a witness of many inhumane acts brought upon people. Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, describes instances of inhumane acts on the Jews at Berkenau-Auswitz, at Buna, and on the march to Gleiwitz.
The Holocaust was a terrible time in history; many innocent people were killed, all because of their faith. The book Night by Ellie Wiesel portrays the vigorous journey Wiesel and his family undergo throughout this torturous time. The holocaust wasn’t just genocide against the Jews; it was also a long process of dehumanizing them too. Their valuables were taken and their heads were shaved stripping them of their identity.
... inferior. Auschwitz is the most notorious concentration camp there was. Two things this camp had that others didn’t was the Gas Chambers and Dr. Mengele. His experiments took on a whole new meaning of cruel and the gas chambers were just another way to kill people. This paper gives me a better understanding of Night because sometimes it’s easier to understand what someone has gone through if you know the extent of the situation. Through my research of Auschwitz I found the extent of cruelty surpassed even my imagination. One thing Elie Wiesel said has stuck with me throughout all of my research on Auschwitz “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” (book's introduction xv) It made me realize that we need to remember the Holocaust and the Genocide that took place during this time because letting it happen again is just as bad as forgetting.
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania. His parents ran a shop and cared for him and his three siblings, Hilda, Bea, and Tzipora. Early on, the Jewish community of Sighet payed little heed to the stories of what had happened to foreign Jews that were expelled. By the time Germans had entered Sighet, it was too late for the people to escape their fates. At first, they were made to give up all of their valuable possessions and move into makeshift ghettos. Next came deportation of the entire community to the Auschwitz internment camp. The way that the people were piled into cattle wagons was only a precurser of appalling events that were to come. The horror really dawned on Elie when he realized that the large smokestacks that he saw were from crematoriums that were set up to burn the bodies of the thousands upon thousands of Jews that were killed in the gas chamber. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. The prisoners were given only black coffee in the morning, and soup and a crust of bread in the evening. The most terrifying aspect of the entire experience was the “selection”, the picking out of those that were to sick, old, or weak to be useful. These unfortunate souls were thrown into the fires. The one constant in Elie’s life was his father, who along with his son and all other prisoners, were later forced to evacuate to trains that would bring them to the Buchenwald internment camp deep in Germany, under the pressure of the Allied forces on the area. The final horrific scene in this book was how the interned, in mass, were forced to run full speed for hours on end, the people that lagged being shot on sight. The story culminated in the death of Elie’s father, and the eventual freedom of the Survivors of these death camps.
In the memoir "Night," Elie Wiesel shares the most horrific and dehumanizing experience of his life as he tells of his survival of the Holocaust. The memoir follows the changes and challenges of the young Jewish teenager and his community during the Holocaust. In 1941, Elie is a young naïve boy whose sole focus is his religious studies; his father is a well-respected pillar of the community. Adolf Hitler’s desire to eradicate the Jewish race brings about the Holocaust which changes everything. What seems so important before the Holocaust no longer seems to matter. The dehumanization of the Holocaust strips the basic fundaments of life away changing everything in its path, including the relationship of a young
In the article, “Columbus’s Legacy: Genocide in the America’s,” by David E. Stannard, the theme can be identified as contrary to popular belief that the millions of native peoples of the Americas that perished in the sixteenth century died not only from disease brought over by the Europeans, but also as a result of mass murder, as well as death due to working them to death.
Since the publication of, Night by Eliezer Wiesel, the holocaust has been deemed one of the darkest times in humanity, from the eradication of Jewish people to killing of innocents. Wiesel was one of the Jewish people to be in the holocaust and from his experience he gave us a memoir that manages to capture the dark side of human nature in the holocaust. He demonstrates the dark side of human nature through the cruelty the guards treat the Jews and how the Jews became cold hearted to each other. Wiesel uses foreshadowing and imagery, and metaphors to describe these events.
During the 1930’s, The Holocaust physically, mentally, and emotionally scarred the lives of all mankind. Elie Wiesel is one of the few who has been able to turn his tragic experience as a concentration camp survivor into a memoir. Although Wiesel’s story isn’t like many others, his use of diction influences the tone and meaning of the story; Wiesel’s attitude in the book is calm, shocking, and thoughtful; capturing attention and spreading awareness to readers all around the world.
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
“What do you expect? That’s war…” Elie Wiesel, young teenage boy sent to work in a concentration camp with his family near the end of WW2. Author of his own autobiography, Night recounting his struggles during that time. This book is about a boy named Elie Wiesel who was captured by the Nazi’s and was put into a concentration camp, and got disconnected from God, and was very close to his mom, dad, and family. Throughout Night Elie Wiesel addresses the topic of genocide through the use of imagery, simile, and personification.
In the 1940s under the rule of Adolf Hitler, German soldiers caused great destruction throughout Europe. Elie Wiesel, a young boy at the time, was caught in the traumatic crossfire of the devastation occurring in that time period. The memoir, Night, tells the horrific stories that Elie Wiesel experienced. Elie was forced into concentration camps with his dad where he soon had to grow up fast to face the reality of his new life filled with violence, inhumanity and starvation, many of which he had never endured before. In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night he validates his theme of violence and inhumane treatment toward Jews through the use of excessive force such as the brutal beating to show Eliezer that he should not have been roaming the camp and
Throughout his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his remarkable story of survival and resilience during the Holocaust. Wiesel describes the deplorable conditions imposed by the Nazi regime, which impacted millions of captives by instilling fear and violence in their daily struggle to survive. In his extraordinary account of his experience, Wiesel demonstrates the Nazi’s inhumanity towards other humans with specific examples of their mistreatment in ghettos, transport trains and concentration camps.
The Holocaust was the execution of 11 million Jews, during the span of 1933 - 1945. Elie Wiesel’s dreadful experience, has provoked him to wright Night, a memoir to his involvement with the Auschwitz concentration camp. Elie Wiesel was sent to Auschwitz, where Nazi’s beat him, and where he and his family was forced to endure labor. Elie’s traumatizing experience with the Holocaust, has altered his relationship with God, and his view on torture.
In his novel Night, Elie Wiesel shows the importance of family as a source of strength to carry on. The main character of the novel is a thirteen-year-old boy named Eliezer. He and his family were taken from their home and placed in a concentration camp. He was separated from his mother and sisters during the selection once they arrived in the camp. His father was the only family he had left with him to face the inhumane environment of the camp. Many of the prisoners lost the will to live due to the conditions. During the marches between camps some of these broken souls would drop to the side of the road where they we...