It is hard to trust in something invisible, especially for a child when he has everything taken away. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls his experiences with his family during World War II. After he first arrives at Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel’s mother and sisters are taken away from him. His father is suddenly all that remains of his family. Elie Wiesel witnesses many other terrible events during his first night at camp; the only thing that keeps him sane is his father. Elie Wiesel’s father even keeps him from possibly killing himself before the Germans could. When Wiesel lives in the concentration camp with his fellow Jews, he begins to question the fairness of God, who he had trusted his entire life. Elie Wiesel loses faith in God, particularly the faith that He would use His divine power to help Wiesel, and begins to rely on his father instead, which gives him more reason to live. When Elie Wiesel was a kid, he had extreme faith in his religion. The first person to question Wiesel’s faith is Moshe the Beadle. Moshe the Beadle asks Elie Wiesel why he prays; after pondering the thought, Wiesel replies, “‘I don’t know why,’ I answered, greatly disturbed” (2). Wiesel does not know
On the day, before the Jewish new year, Elie Wiesel had to watch the other Jews pray before eating their soup. The fact that he doesn’t join in shows how much faith Wiesel has already lost in the idea that God might save them. Wiesel thinks that praying is pointless and instead they should focus on their survival, “What does Your greatness mean, Lord of the universe, in the face of all this weakness [...] Why do you still trouble their sick minds, their crippled bodies?” (p.63). As if God is trying to see how long a race of suffering people can honor him, Wiesel points these questions at God instead of the people deciding to pray, and this shows that Wiesel still believes God
..." (1829). Wiesel is saying that if God existed, why would he have allowed the Holocaust to happen? Of course, this is one question among many that will never be answered for him.
Elie Wiesel spent thirteen years of his life seeking God through prayer, study, and examination of the goodness of those around him. In a few short months, Adolf Hitler managed to destroy all of things that made up the foundation of Elie’s life. The physical scars, the hunger, the sickness all healed with time, but Wiesel still is missing the most important pieces that were taken from him during his stay in Nazi concentration camps – his faith in his Lord, his trust in father and friend, and his knowledge of the essential goodness of humankind.
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.
explains Elie (Wiesel 33). Here Elie starts to question if God and his beliefs have become one of
Elie seems to lose faith in God. “"Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba…May His name be celebrated and sanctified…" whispered my father. For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” (33) The God Elie once prayed and cried out to before was allowing his people to die in horrible ways. God, a being who is supposed to be loving and merciful was allowing them to die alongside millions of other
The significance of night throughout the novel Night by Elie Wiesel shows a poignant view into the daily life of Jews throughout the concentration camps. Eliezer describes each day as if there was not any sunshine to give them hope of a new day. He used the night to symbolize the darkness and eeriness that were brought upon every Jew who continued to survive each day in the concentration camps. However, night was used as an escape from the torture Eliezer and his father had to endure from the Kapos who controlled their barracks. Nevertheless, night plays a developmental role of Elie throughout he novel.
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
In the novel Night, “Wiesel's childhood faith in the goodness and promise of God was forever shattered when as a young boy he was deported along with his family from their native Transylvania to Auschwitz. Arriving at Auschwitz Wiesel learned what Dostoevsky in his own time knew, that the sin against the child is the only unforgivable sin, for it indicts not only man but man's creator. Echoing Dostoevsky, he writes: “A Child who dies becomes the center of the universe: stars and meadows die with him.”” (Idinopulos). In the novel Night, “His relationship to God is similarly disrupted. Immediately, Job-like, Eliezer begins to question the justice of God. How could God allow good people to suffer so” (Estees)? For example, Elie says, “An icy wind was blowing violently. But we marched without faltering. The SS made us increase our pace. “Faster, you tramps, you flea-ridden dogs!””. For example this is making them feel degraded and believe that God is not with them anymore (Wiesel 85). Elie Wiesel felt, “In Night, the relationship between God and man is first questioned and then reversed: God becomes the guilty one who has transgressed and who deserves to be on trial. God, not man, has broken His promises and betrayed His people” (Estees). As a strong belie...
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.
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.
Wiesel talks of feeling that he is stronger than God. He sees those around him as being weak because of their need for God. Needing anything while in captivity can only make him weaker and more vulnerable. Because Wiesel feels abandoned and has calloused over his need for God, he feels stronger than the rest of the Jewish people- stronger even than the One they need.
The general argument made by author Wiesel in his speech, “The Perils of Indifference, is that indifference is dangerous. More specifically, Wiesel argues that indifference to those suffering is inhumane. He writes, “Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger.” In the article, Weisel is suggesting that God’s
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...
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
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