Surviving Reality
Imagine the life of a young boy and his normal day-to-day responsibilities. Imagine the studying, the eating, the sleeping, the praying, etc. Imagine after fifteen years of the expected, everything he had ever known was gone, everything except for his father. The book Night by Elie Wiesel uses vivid, gruesome pictures and colorful language to depict his personal experiences and hardships as he navigates through the challenges of multiple concentration camps and struggles of adapting to life as a prisoner during World War II.
Elie Wiesel wrote the book Night to give readers an insight to the Holocaust and to highlight its disturbing reality. Night is narrated by a Jewish fifteen-year-old, Elizer Wiesel, who lives in the town
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A few of the recorded, harsh episodes are when a brutal foreman pries Elizer’s gold tooth out of his mouth with a rusty spoon, when the prisoners are forced to watch other prisoners and children hung in the camp courtyard. Also, sons start to abandon and abuse their own family for an extra ration of watered down soup and crusty bread. Throughout this book, Wiesel shows that not only does he endure physical torture, but emotional as well. Beacuse of this, Elizer began to lose his faith, not only in God but also in humanity all together. While Elizer is in the infirmary due to a recent foot surgery, the Nazis decide to evacuate the camp, which resulted in forcing the prisoners to run for more than fifty miles during a snowstorm to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. Because of the harsh conditions, lack of water and food, and extreme exhaustion, many people die. But the deadly journey did not stop there, they traveled by cattle cars and eventually made it to their final concentration camp, Buchenwald. Due to dysentery, age, and physical abuse, Eliezer’s father dies and Elizer is left alone in a camp full of the abusers and the abused. On April 11, 1945, the American army broke down the prison walls and freed the remaining few prisoners who were strong enough to withstand the abuse and neglect long enough to be considered a human
The Book Night was the autobiography of Eliezer Wiesel. This was a horrible and sobering tale of his life story. The story takes place in Sighet, Translyvania. It's the year 1941 and World War II is occurring. Eliezer was 12 at this time and wasn't really aware of what was occurring in the world concerning the Jewish people. He had a friend who went by the name Moshe the Beadle. Moshe was very good friend of Elezers'.
Most people have never experienced anything near as awful as what Wiesel experienced. He was one of the only people who found a way to hold onto their faith. Many made excuses not to perform rituals and eventually lost all faith. Wiesel was weakened, but remained faithful. Akiba Drumer, a friend of Wiesel, tried to convince himself that it was a test by God. However, Akiba also lost faith. “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” (Wiesel 34) This quote was from a small portion of Wiesel’s “Never Shall I Forget Poem.” It showed how Elie lost faith in God when he saw what the Nazis were doing to families and children. This quote shows how the religious part of Elie was “murdered.” Elie seemed to become foreign and isolated from his people. He seemed to be just going through the motions during his time in the camps. “In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.” (Mauriac XXI) This quote shows how Wiesel felt like he was a stranger to the religion, community, and faith. Elie Wiesel couldn’t understand why God would hurt people, and most of all why he was spared. “And question of questions: Where was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God.” (Hope, Despair and Memory) This shows how Wiesel couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind God. He wanted
About halfway through his imprisonment, Eliezer had gotten accustomed to life in a concentration camp. Despite the magnitude of death in every camp Elie was held hostage, nothing was worse than when three people were hanged in front of his eyes. The people were convicted suspiciously without confirmation of their crime; the youngest of which was about a twelve year old boy who was an assistant to one of the Nazi Kapos. After this experience, Wiesel writes, “That night, the soup tasted of corpses.” (65). The author incorporates a metaphor for his feelings and related it to the soup Eliezer was given; the soup did not literally taste like corpses, but this was how he felt because of all the death. The symbolism of his soup tasting like corpses relates to how death was surrounding Wiesel at the camp, and it also represents how he has lost faith in God. There were many places throughout the book in which Elie experiences things that make him question his faith, none more than when he thought there would be no chance of his
Night by Elie Wiesel was a memoir on one of the worst things to happen in human history, the Holocaust. A terrible time where the Nazi German empire started to take control of eastern Europe during WWII. This book tells of the terrible things that happened to the many Jewish people of that time. This time could easily change grown men, and just as easily a boy of 13. Elie’s relationship with God and his father have been changed forever thanks to the many atrocities committed at that time.
In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel remembers his time at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Elie begins to lose his faith in God after his faith is tested many times while at the concentration camp. Elie conveys to us how horrific events have changed the way he looks at his faith and God. Through comments such as, “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God, my soul, and turned my dreams into dust,” he reveals the toll that the Holocaust has taken on him. The novel begins during the years of 1942-1944 in Sighet, Transylvannia, Romania. Elie Wiesel and his family are deported and Elie is forced to live through many horrific events. Several events such as deportation, seeing dead bodies while at Auschwitz, and separation from his mother and sisters, make Elie start to question his absolute faith in God.
The tone of the novel is greatly influenced through the fact that the story is autobiographical. There seems to be only one agenda utilized by Elie Wiesel in regards to the tone of the story as he presents the information for the readers’ evaluation. The point of the story is to provide the reader an emotional link to the horror of the holocaust through the eyes of one whom experienced those horrors. Wiesel speaks with a distance that is often found in autobiographies. He presents the facts as to what he saw, thought, and felt during those long years in the camps. Wiesel, in essence, is now the same as Moshe the Beadle, one of the first Jewish deportees and the only one to return to the city to warn others. “He told his story and that of his companions," (page 4, 5th paragraph). Elie has become Moshe. He tells his story, not for himself for he has already experienced the horrors, but to make sure that people are aware of what has happened, and so that it never happens again.
Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel, a young Jewish boy, who tells of his experiences during the Holocaust. Elie is a deeply religious boy whose favorite activities are studying the Talmud and spending time at the Temple with his spiritual mentor, Moshe the Beadle. At an early age, Elie has a naive, yet strong faith in God. But this faith is tested when the Nazi's moves him from his small town.
The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time of life” and through his journey into night he can’t see the “light” at the end of the tunnel, only continuous dread and darkness. Night is a memoir that is written in the style of a bildungsroman, a loss of innocence and a sad coming of age. This memoir reveals how Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) gradually loses his faith and his relationships with both his father (dad), and his Father (God). Sickened by the torment he must endure, Wiesel questions if God really exists, “Why, but why should I bless him? Because he in his great might, had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? (67). Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel’s faith is not permanently shattered. Although after his father dies, his faith in god and religion is shaken to the core, and arguably gone. Wiesel, along with most prisoners, lose their faith in God. Wiesel’s loss of religion becomes the loss of identity, humanity, selfishness, and decency.
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.
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.
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize men and cause them to revert to basic instincts. Wiesel and his peers devolve from civilized human beings to savage animals during the course of Night.
The ground is frozen, parents sob over their children, stomachs growl, stiff bodies huddle together to stay slightly warm. This was a recurrent scene during World War II. Night is a literary memoir of Elie Wiesel’s tenure in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel created a character reminiscent of himself with Eliezer. Eliezer experienced cruelty, stress, fear, and inhumanity at a very young age, fifteen. Through this, he struggled to maintain his Jewish faith, survive with his father, and endure the hardships placed on his body and mind.
Night is an autobiography by a man named Eliezer Wiesel. The autobiography is a quite disturbing record of Elie’s childhood in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald during world war two. While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated by a boy named Eliezer who represents Elie, but details set apart the character Eliezer from the real life Elie. For instance, Eliezer wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Elie actually wounded his knee. Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost impossibly painful for a survivor to write about his Holocaust experience, and the mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel to distance himself somewhat from the experience, to look in from the outside.
Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born September 30, 1928 in Sighet Transylvania, now Romania. Wiesel was the third child of four. His two older sisters were Hilda and Beatrice Wiesel, whom he was not as close with compared to his little sister, Tzipora. His mother and father were named Sarah and Shlomo Wiesel. In 1944, Wiesel’s family and the remainder of the community were placed into two separate ghettos in Sighet, formed by the incoming Nazis. Later on, they were relocated to Auschwitz, where Elie’s mother and Tzipora were killed. Then, he and his father were moved to Buna and finally Buchenwald. In Buchenwald, Elie’s father died, and only days later Elie was liberated, now sixteen years old. Elis Wiesel did not write Night until 10 years after his liberation, and continued on to write books such as, And the World Would Remain Silent in 1956 and Dawn in 1961 (“Elie Wiesel”).