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Holocaust themes in literature
Holocaust themes in literature
Prevalent themes in Holocaust literature
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“Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death” (Conrad 1). From the beginning of the novel, Night, by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist Eliezer is portrayed as a very religious person, and his belief in God is absolute, but as the novels proceeds this sense of faith ends because of the circumstances Eliezer has to go through. One can infer that the changes in Eliezer’s belief were due to several reasons. This essay will be focusing on how Eliezer’s journey of the holocaust causes drastic changes of his views and beliefs in the benevolent God. Some of the reasons why Eliezer loses faith and belief in God include: the cruelty and evil that Eliezer has to witness at the German concentration camps, the selfishness that he sees from people on his journey, and the loses faces due to the war. Therefore, Elie Wiesel has attempted to portray the holocaust as the driving force for the protagonist’s disbelief in God, and has also pointed out how cruelty and evil affects Eliezer’s faith and his belief in the Benevolent. Firstly, the cruelty and evil that Eliezer has to witness at the Nazi concentration camps causes him to lose faith in God and religion. In section four, at the hanging of some treasonous Jews, Eliezer answers a man’s question of “Where is God now?” by saying “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .” (Wiesel 65) because he is trying to imply that the benevolent God has died a mortal being’s death, and is comparing God’s “Death” to the young boy Pipel’s hanging, by the Nazi soldiers. Throughout the novel, cruelty and evil of individuals causes problems through Eliezer’s journey and the only being he can blame is God. We see in section fo... ... middle of paper ... ... loses belief in God and religion include: the cruelty and evil that Eliezer has to witness at the German concentration camps, the selfishness that he observes from people on his journey, and the loses he faces due to the war. Therefore, Wiesel has tried to portray Eliezer’s struggle to maintain belief in God, as one of the key themes in the novel, and has shown that this is one of the significant reasons for the tragedy’s that Eliezer has faced throughout his journey of the holocaust. Work Cited Page • Wiesel, Elie. Night. United States: Hill and Wang, 1960, print. • Puz, Richard. Quotes about death of a loved one. Good Reads. ND. < http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/death-of-a-loved-one> Jan 2nd 2014. • Conrad, Peter. Quotes about death. Brainy quotes. ND. Jan 2nd 2014.
Throughout his recollections, it is clear that Elie has a constant struggle with his belief in God. Prior to Auschwitz, Elie was motivated, even eager to learn about Jewish mysticism. Yet, after he had been exposed to the reality of the concentration camps, Elie began to question God. According to Elie, God “caused thousands of children to burn...He kept six crematoria working day and night...He created Auschwitz, Birkenau, [and] Buna”(67). Elie could not believe the atrocities going on around him. He could not believe that the God he followed tolerated such things. During times of sorrow, when everyone was praying and sanctifying His name, Elie no longer wanted to praise the Lord; he was at the point of giving up. The fact that the “Terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent”(33) caused Elie to lose hope and faith. When one cho...
In the 1930s-1940s, the Nazis took millions of Jews into their death camps. They exterminated children, families, and even babies. Elie Wiesel was one of the few who managed to live through the war. However, his life was forever scarred by things he witnessed in these camps. The book Night explained many of the harsh feelings that Elie Wiesel experienced in his time in various German concentration camps. Prior to being taken, it is known that Wiesel was very strong in his beliefs of God and the ideas behind the Jewish religion. However, he questioned God while he endured the torture that the Nazis inflicted on many different races. He questioned why God had done this to these innocent people. Elie Wiesel lost much of his faith while in the
Elizer’s personal account of the holocaust does not merely highlight the facts of the holocaust: millions suffered and the event was politically and religiously motivated, but provides an in depth investigation to what a person endured mentally, physically, and emotionally. Beginning as a teenager, Elizer thought highly of God and of his own beliefs, however, that quickly diminished when he was put into a system of sorting and killing people. During the holocaust, Elizer was not the only person to change; almost everyone suffered and changed differently. The stressful and harsh times affected Elizer just as they affected the person working next to him in the factory. Elizer quickly began to question everything “I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?” (Wiesel 32). Although Elizer forms this mentality, he also finds the will to survive, to protect his father, and to not turn into the people that were aro...
Wiesel’s community at the beginning of the story is a little town in Transylvania where the Jews of Sighet are living. It’s called “The Jewish Community of Sighet”. This is where he spent his childhood. By day he studied Talmud and at night he ran to the synagogue to shed tears over the destruction of the Temple. His world is a place where Jews can live and practice Judaism. As a young boy who is thirteen at the beginning of the story, I am very impressed with his maturity. For someone who is so young at the time he is very observant of his surroundings and is very good at reading people. In the beginning he meets Moishe the Beadle. Moishe is someone who can do many different types of work but he isn’t considered qualified at any of those jobs in a Hasidic house of prayer (shtibl). For some reason, though young Elie is fascinated with him. He meets Moishe the Beadle in 1941. At the time Elie really wants to explore the studies of Kabbalah. One day he asks his father to find him a master so he can pursue this interest. But his father is very hesitant about this idea and thinks young E...
In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, religion plays an important role in the lives of the characters. As the story progresses, the characters all react to their situations with varying degrees of questioning their faith. Their reactions range from turning their back on religion completely to clinging to it in an effort to explain what is happening around them. Ultimately, this book shows that religion, although an important part of many people’s lives, can never explain why bad (or even good) things happen to people.
If, all of a sudden, the population of Rio de Janeiro vanished one day, people would take notice almost instantly. However, when six million Jewish people were killed in the concentration camps during WWII, people turned a blind eye, even when they were fully aware of what was happening. Elie Wiesel was among the people who disappeared into the night and was one of the lucky ones that survived. Ten years later, he wrote about his experience in his memoir Night. In the memoir, one of the main themes is faith, or lack thereof. When some of the prisoners lose their faith, they lose the will to live as well. For young Elie Wiesel, faith is the only thing he focused on. So when he loses his faith, he almost gives up but he manages to keep going without the aid of his God.
Many people don’t care about something or an issue until it happens directly to them or to their loved ones. Even if it were nations becoming alienated, they wouldn’t want to go near the problem or the unfairness and instead, they choose to runaway. Elie Wiesel addresses this problem in a short paragraph by saying: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere…. Action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.” Elie Wiesel asserts that the world community is responsible to interfere when acts such as mass murder or genocide occur. He says that “silence encourages the tormentor” and “indifference is the most insidious danger of all”. One must speak out against oppression so there can be a difference. When one remains silent and doesn’t act, they are encouraging the person responsible for the genocide, not the victim. Thus, at times when one thinks that they are just being neutral, this neutrality invites more oppression, and even worse, if one were to have a whole nation with this type of mindset. That is why I agree to Elie Wiesel’s contention about standing up against oppression.
After a brief stay at Auschwitz, they are moved to a new camp, Buna. At Buna, Elie goes through the dehumanizing process of the concentration camps. Both he and his father experience severe beatings at the hand of the kapos. All the prisoners are overworked and undernourished. Many lose faith in God, including Elie. He witnesses several hangings, one of a boy with an angelic face, and sees him struggle for over thirty minutes fighting for his life. To a stranger's cry of "Where is God now?", Elie answers: "He is hanging here on this gallows...." (p. 62). As Elie witnesses the hanging of the young pipel, he feels that it is his God who is hanging on the gallows. Elie i...
• At the beginning of Night, Eliezer describes himself as someone who believes “profoundly.” How have his experiences at Auschwitz affected that faith?
The Germans had tortured Elie Wiesel in the story “Night” during the holocaust because of his religion. He believes that the people who were indifferent and were just an observer caused the Germans to torture him. He thinks if people who were observers, st...
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is an extremely passionate and devout Jew, but as the story progresses, Elie sees horrendous things in the concentration camps, and as a result, he slowly loses his faith. Elie displays his extreme devotion in the beginning stages of the memoir when he states, “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry” (Wiesel 4). Elie is clearly very fond of learning more about his religion and connecting to God in a spiritual way. Furthermore, Elie is only thirteen years old, so when he says he cries because he feels the need to cry, he is exhibiting incredible passion. Elie reveals signs of change and begins to lose his faith in God just a few moments after arriving at the concentration camp when he says, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (Wiesel 34). Elie exclaims that he cannot worship God anymore due to the awful things he has seen at Auschwitz. He does not want to believe in the being that could have allowed these awful events to happen. This is a completely different Elie from the loving and caring Elie in the ghetto. Elie also uses rep...
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.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, humanity is a theme seen throughout. Humanity can be defined in many ways. It can be the disposition to do good, or it can be the human race. In the Night, the theme of humanity is the disposition to do good. In the book, Elie loses and finds his humanity. At the end, he holds on to his humanity, but loses some of it after events like his father’s death. Elie succeeds in retaining his humanity because he holds on to his father, he feels sympathy for people at the camps, and he keeps faith. Elie retains his humanity in the end even though he loses it in the middle of the book.
At the beginning of the book, Eliezer was in the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This hierarchy starts at the bottom with physiological needs, and progresses upwards with safety needs, belonging and love, esteem, and finally self-actualization. Eliezer was working with his love and belonging needs with respect to his religion. He was obsessed with the Jewish scripture. He wanted to learn. He was an extremely intellectual teenager. He would study the Jewish scripture with Moche the Beadle. "We would read together, ten times over, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by hear, but to extract the divine essence from it." His views on the divinity of God do not endure through the Holocaust and the concentration camps.