Loss Of Innocence In Night

Night by Elie Wiesel is a harrowing story of his experiences as a young boy during the Holocaust at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp that killed over 1 million people during World War II. This book examines the effects that tragic circumstances have on the innocence of children, and the humanity in people as a whole. Over the course of a year, Elie is forced to witness events such as the brutal murders of his people, the decline and eventual loss of hope for survival, and the deterioration and death of his father. Because of these horrific events, Elie loses his faith in God, his faith in humanity, and his childhood and innocence.
Elie’s most profound loss was the loss of his faith. As a child, he and his family’s morals and philosophies were strongly rooted in the Jewish faith. Faith gave them identity and purpose. Elie himself was very religious, even studying a separate branch of Judaism at night after going to school. “During the day I studied the Talmud, and

Because of his father’s sharp decline in health, Elie was forced into a position of complete responsibility over his father. During this time, some of Elie’s childlike selfishness is still visible, but Elie finds the strength to care for his father, even if it meant putting his father’s needs above his own. After more than a weak of his father’s struggle with dysentery, Elie wakes up to find that his father had died and had been taken to the creamatorium. Elie does not describe his time in a children’s block after the death of his father, because the shock of losing him meant nothing mattered to Elie any more. When Elie leaves the camp with the liberation, he acquires food poisoning and spends weeks in the hospital. It is here that Elie looks at himself in a mirror for the first time after being removed from his home. “From the depths of the mirror,” he wrote, “a corpse gazed back at