Horrors of the Holocaust Imagine being trapped in a ghetto, seeing communities leaving in trains, families being split up, never to see each other again.. The emotions that each and every Holocaust survivor must’ve gone through is overwhelming. Some things that are taken for granted, will never be seen again. While reading the two texts, Night by Elie Wiesel and “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” by Pavel Friedman, The two predominant emotions that prevailed most to Holocaust victims and survivors were hope and fear.
Hope was a prevailing emotion to the victims of the holocaust because hope that one day you will return home and see your family and that God will answer your prayers. Hope is all you need to keep going, and live through the horror of the camps. I believe that hope is the prevailing emotion because in the excerpt of Night, it states, “‘No!’ I cried. ‘He isn’t dead! Not yet!’”(Wiesel 104). The quote supports the emotion because Elie doesn’t know for sure if his father is dead or not, hope is what’s keeping him and the men still alive
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In the excerpt of Night, it states, “Dozens of starving men fought each other to the death for a few crumbs.” (Wiesel 105) This describes fear because to imagine that food is more important than one's’ life is scary to think about. People wanting to kill each other just to eat something is hard to think about. In the poem, “I Never Saw ANother Butterfly” it states “Butterflies don’t live in here, In the ghetto”(Friedman 16-17) This is an example of fear because this quote gives a sense of eeriness to the setting and it describes when he realizes that things will never be the same again. It also symbolizes he won’t just never see another butterfly but his home, family, and life will never be the same ever again. With death being inevitable not only would you be scared you would also be
It is interesting to read the connections of Night, by Elie Wiesel because they include the experiences of the Holocaust from other people's’ points of views. In A Spring Morning, by Ida Fink, it is shocking that the innocence has been stripped away from the child as the speaker reveals, “Fire years old! The age for teddy bears and blocks” (Wiesel 129). This child is born innocent, she has not harmed anyone, yet she has to suffer. Reading about the Holocaust is difficult, I wonder how others had the motivation to live during it. The description of a little girl getting shot is heartbreaking as the speaker explains, “At the edge of the sidewalk lay a small, bloody rag…. He [Aron] had to keep on walking, carrying his dead child” (Wiesel 133).
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.
It is almost unimaginable the difficulties victims of the holocaust faced in concentration camps. For starters they were abducted from their homes and shipped to concentration camps in tightly packed cattle cars. Once they made it to a camp, a selection process occurred. The males were separated from the females. Then those who were too young or too old to work were sent to the showers. Once the showers were tightly packed, the Nazi’s would turn on the water and drop in canisters of chemicals that would react with the water and release a deadly gas. Within minutes, everyone in the shower would be dead. The bodies would be hauled out and burned. Those who were not selected to die didn’t fair much better. Terrible living conditions, forced labor, malnourishment, and physical abuse were just a few of the things they had to endure. It was such a dark time. So many invaluable lessons can be learned from the holocaust and from those who survived it. One theme present in Elie Wiesel’s novel Night and Robert Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful is that family can strengthen or hinder one during adversity.
The Holocaust will forever be known as one of the largest genocides ever recorded in history. 11 million perished, and 6 million of the departed were Jewish. The concentration camps where the prisoners were held were considered to be the closest one could get to a living hell. There is no surprise that the men, women, and children there were afraid. One was considered blessed to have a family member alongside oneself. Elie Wiesel was considered to be one of those men, for he had his father working side by side with him. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his father were condemned to a concentration camp located in Poland. In the concentration camps, having family members along can be a great blessing, but also a burden. Elie Wiesel shows that the relationship with his father was the strength that kept the young boy alive, but was also the major weakness.
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.”
Many different responses have occurred to 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 of the most fabled stories of our time come from individuals overcoming impossible odds and surviving horrific situations. This is prevalent throughout the Holocaust. People are fascinated with this event in history because the survivors had to overcome immense odds. One, of many, of the more famous stories about the Holocaust is Night by Elie Wiesel. Through this medium, Wiesel still manages to capture the horrors of the camps, despite the reader already knowing the story.
All humans are supposed to have emotion, but when people don’t have anything to hold on to positive emotions can become dormant. The memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, is Wiesel’s story from surviving the Holocaust with the help of his father and fighting to stay alive day by day. Wiesel suffered from brutal conditions in labor camps and managed to survive through the agony while watching others perished every day. The unnatural behavior by the S.S. led to dehumanization that shattered the faith of Elie Wiesel and many other prisoners.
...igher being, or achieving a lifetime goal. People can survive even in the most horrible of situations as long as they have hope and the will to keep fighting, but when that beacon begins to fade. They will welcome what ever ends their plight. The Holocaust is one of the greatest tragedies in human history. Elie Wiesel wrote this memoir in hopes that future generations don't forget the mistakes of the past, so that they may not repeat them in the future, even so there is still genocide happening today in places like Kosovo, Somalia, and Darfur, thousands of people losing their will to live because of the horrors they witness, if Elie Wiesel has taught us anything, it is that the human will is the weakest yet strongest of forces.
The best teachers have the capabilities to teach from first hand experience. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel conveys his grueling childhood experiences of survival to an audience that would otherwise be left unknown to the full terrors of the Holocaust. Night discloses mental and physical torture of the concentration camps; this harsh treatment forced Elie to survive rather than live. His expert use of literary devices allowed Wiesel to grasp readers by the hand and theatrically display to what extent the stress of survival can change an individual’s morals. Through foreshadowing, symbolism, and repetition, Wiesel’s tale proves that the innate dark quality of survival can take over an individual.
In Night, Elie Wiesel uses tone to express the emotions he felt and explain the situations he endured during the Holocaust. The most prevalent tones in the book are anguish and hopelessness, but many more are also present. At the beginning of the book, Wiesel’s tone is more optimistic towards his situation and hopeful for a better outcome, but as the book progresses, Wiesel changes the tone to one of dreariness and hopelessness due to the new environments and events he endures.
The delineation of human life is perceiving existence through resolute contrasts. The difference between day and night is defined by an absolute line of division. For the Jewish culture in the twentieth century, the dissimilarity between life and death is bisected by a definitive line - the Holocaust. Accounts of life during the genocide of the Jewish culture emerged from within the considerable array of Holocaust survivors, among of which are Elie Wiesel’s Night and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Both accounts of the Holocaust diverge in the main concepts in each work; Wiesel and Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their survivals. Aside from the themes, various aspects, including perception, structure, organization, and flow of arguments in each work, also contrast from one another. Although both Night and The Sunflower are recollections of the persistence of life during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their existence during the atrocity in their corresponding works.
The memoir, Night, demonstrates that there is good in having hope in the sense that it can make an ideal of surviving into more of a reality, therefore it is easier to prevail.There are many points throughout the text where the author, Elie Wiesel alludes to this. At one point Elie is describing the experience close to the start of the time in the concentration camp: “Our moral was much improved. A good night’s sleep had done its work. Friends met, exchanged a few sentences. We spoke of everything without ever mentioning those who had disappeared. The prevailing opinion was that the war was about to end.” (pg. 42) In this particular part of the memoir, the community around Elie is holding the ideal of the war coming to an end before it gravely
Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.
"Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, we feel that we are greater than we know."- William Wordsworth. As stated in this quote, when we have something to hope for, and someone showing us love, we are capable of many things. In the movie Life is Beautiful and the book Night love and hope are the only things that keep the characters alive. This is shown through Elie and his father's relationship when his father reminds him of his fundamental feelings of love, compassion, and devotion to his family. Then Elie and his father look out for each other in hope to make it out the concentration camp alive. Love and hope are also shown in the movie Life is Beautiful when Guido and his son were taken to the concentration camp. Here, Guido's love for his son Josh, kept him alive. Dora, Guido's wife, shows persistent hope which ultimately leads to being reunited with Joshua. In both stories the hope that of rescue and the love that for each other gets the main characters through terrible times.