How can one keep hope in the darkest of nights? Eliezer Wiesel found and lost hope throughout his life during the Holocaust in a traumatic and heartbreaking story. The chance that he would end up in Auschwitz was beyond his control, but he quickly learned how to make decisions while in camp: keep quiet, eat the soup (even if you don’t like it), and do everything in your power to stay with who you came with. Elie wanted to believe that he could control the events happening around him, but he ended up losing his childlike view of the world in an instant. Survival was the game, anything to stay alive was the play.
The whole novel is a story of the luck of the draw, chance and choice and the men and women dealing with absolute hell. Whether or not to flee Sighet was the first test of these themes in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Elie’s strong faith had led him under the wing of Moishe the Beadle, who ultimately became hopeless as he begged those around him to flee. Elie’s father chose to stay in Sighet despite the rumors coming from the war front. His father said that a man as old as he was too old to start a whole new life in a brand new place. When he wasn’t given a choice in the matter, chance (or luck as Elie says) at least kept him them together.
Their old maid, Maria, offered a place of refuge. Elie’s father said that only Elie and his older sisters would be able to go with Maria. Elie stated that there was no way he would separate from his family voluntarily. Elie and his father were strong together, even though the men around them would soon becoming more and more greedy for survival. Choice and chance appear to blur together in Night, and in Elie’s own opinion, all actions lead to the same fate under the conditions.
Upon entering t...
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...to sleep with girls. But still no trace of revenge.” (Wiesel, 115).
No revenge? Eliezer has survived the Holocaust, yet he feels defeated. His father has passed away, by chance, days before the end. I feel that feels no revenge at this point because he realized that it was all chance. Even the men in charge were operating by chance. The whole war was a product of choice and chance. I don’t believe that people had a say in what happened to them, despite their choices. I believe that Elie felt the same way, specifically towards the end of the novel. He had to become a completely different person just to survive, for physical and mental reasons. There was chaos. Control is a word that became obsolete, and Elie accepted it to be so: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” (Wiesel, 115).
At Birkenau in 1944, the father-son bond is greatly strengthened. It is here where the men separate from the women, and Elie’s mother and three sisters separate from Elie. Elie becomes completely dependant on his father for the first time. Elie has one thought when this separation occurs. “Not to lose him. Not to be left alone” (27). In Sighet, Elie never has this...
When the novel Night begins, Elie is in his hometown of Sighet and begins learning about a new more experienced form of his religion. During one fateful day of study, Elie finds their small town invaded by Hungarian police looking for Jewish members in town. During the next few days, the town evacuates by force to an unknown fate. For those few days, Elie and his sisters begin distributing water to the towns’ people waiting for their evacuation. While it is distributed, Elie compares the open street as if it was “[a]n open tomb. A summer sun. [sic]” (Wiesel 17). The police are leaving the townspeople to rot in the open sun so much so that the people are weak and non-resistant to the evacuation. Elies father is his only remaining
At last, his father was free. He wasn't taking any more beatings, he isn't suffering, and he doesn't have to be in the concentration camps anymore. Elie is free, he doesn't have to carry the weight of his father anymore. Three months after his fathers death nothing mattered to him anymore. The father son relationship shown in this novel, is something no one else has ever seen before. As you can see the roles switch throughout the story. In the beginning Elie’s father is strong, a role model a leader, but through the story he becomes child-like vulnerable, weak. On the other hand, Elie goes from admiring his dad, to worrying and carrying for
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.
In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, a bunch of relationships change dramatically according to Elie. This novel shows many changes with people that really affects the story. His relationship with with his father is the biggest change of all. It can be seen from the beginning to the end. Elie’s relationship with God changes as well. He had strong faith in God but yet as the story goes on, the camp starts to affect him and slowly loses faith. Another is the relationship with his friends. As the the story progresses, he slowly grows apart. He became more more independent except for being with his father.
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...
Before the Great War begins affecting the Wiesel’s and ten Boom’s lives, both families experience a premonition of a dark future ahead of them. Ironically, neither family chooses to listen to these signs. In the novel Night, there are two events of visions. One is a character named Moshe the Beadle. He is a premonition for the town of Sighet in which Elie and his family are living in. Moshe is a sign because he survived and came back to tell his story and warn the people of the dangers they were about to face. Moshe reaches the town and yells, “I warned you.’ And left without waiting for a response” (10) His story speaks about his experience as a prisoner on the train:
In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel faces the horrors of the Holocaust, where he loses many friends and family, and almost his life. He starts as a kind young boy, however, his environment influences many of the decisions he makes. Throughout the novel, Elie Wiesel changes into a selfish boy, thinks of his father as a liability and loses his faith in God as an outcome his surroundings.
Why did Elie let it happen? What could Elie really have done as an alternative to save his father from dying? He could not have helped his father from being beaten up by the SS guards but he did try to help him from being attacked by his own men in his sleeping barracks. Elie really wanted his father to live. Elie does everything possible to help his father unless it would do harm to himself.
...e has to deal with the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God at the very young age of fifteen. He retells the horrors of the concentration camp, of starvation, beatings, torture, illness, and hard labor. He comes to question how God could let this happen and to redefine the existence of God in the concentration camp. This book is also filled with acts of kindness and compassion amid the degradation and violence. It seems that for every act of violence that is committed, Elie counteracts with some act of compassion. Night is a reflection on goodness and evil, on responsibility to family and community, on the struggle to forge identity and to maintain faith. It shows one boy's transformation from spiritual idealism to spiritual death via his journey through the Nazi's failed attempt to conquer and erase a people and their faith.
As humans, we require basic necessities, such as food, water, and shelter to survive. But we also need a reason to live. The reason could be the thought of a person, achieving some goal, or a connection with a higher being. Humans need something that drives them to stay alive. This becomes more evident when people are placed in horrific situations. In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, he reminisces about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. There the men witness horrific scenes of violence and death. As time goes on they begin to lose hope in the very things that keep them alive: their faith in God, each other, and above all, themselves.
Elie goes to Auschwitz at an innocent, young stage in his life. Due to his experiences at this concentration camp, he loses his faith, his bond with his father, and his innocence. Situations as horrendous as the Holocaust will drastically change people, no matter what they were like before the event, and this is evident with Elie's enormous change throughout the memoir Night.
His father is getting old, and weak, and Elie realizes his father does not have the strength to survive on his own, and it is too late to save him. "It's too late to save your old father, I said to myself..."(pg 105). He felt guilty because he could not help his father, but he knew the only way to live is to watch out for himself. "Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father..."(pg 105). He thinks of himself, and
The theme of Night is resilience. To be resilient is to be strong and able to bounce back when things happen. Elie shows resilience many times throughout the course of Night, and some of these times included when Elie and his block are being forced to run to the new camp, when somebody attempts to kill him and when he loses his father to sickness. When Elie is with the group of people running to the new camp, he knows that he needs to persevere and be resilient, even when the person that he is talking to gives up (Wiesel 86). Elie tries to tell somebody that they need to keep going, and that it will not be much longer, but when they give up, Elie does not seem to pity the boy, and he stays strong. Somebody also attempted to strangle Elie while
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