The Night By Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the unforgettable tale of his account of the savagery and brutality the Nazis showed during the Holocaust. Night depicts the story of a budding Jew from the small town of Sighet named Eliezer. He and his family are exiled to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. He must master the skills needed to survive with his father’s guidance until he finds liberation from the monstrosity that is the camp. This memoir, however, hides a far more meaningful lesson that can only be revealed through careful analyzation.

“I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.” (5)

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” - George Bernard Shaw. George Shaw’s famous quote describes that to achieve, you must change yourself. On May 1944, Elie Wiesel and his family were forced out from his home in Sighet, Romania to live in Auschwitz, Germany. He and his two older sisters survived the holocaust, Elie then wrote his experience in 1960. During the span of the book, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the novel demonstrates that traumatic events can change a person drastically. In the beginning, Elie lived with his family in Germany, his mother, his father, and his three siblings. The Germans forced the Jews to hand over their valuables, live in ghettos and finally moving them to concentration camps, including Elie’s family. He was disunited from his mother and three siblings, but managed to stay with his father. At first when he entered the camp he was pessimistic and discouraged when he saw the townspeople crying including his father. After, Elie then learned to take care of himself and his father during tragic events, he stuck to his ambitions and values which led him to go through many obstacles , despite the limitations, and be free of the camp of Auschwitz. As he set out Eliezer was an immature and carefree 15 year old who developed into a responsible young adult.

The appeal to emotion is the strongest by far. It seems almost impossible for a reader not to cry at the words of Wiesel. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. His vivid description of a child being hanged, how he was still alive, “struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes”, truly captures the ghastly occurrences of the death camp. His own discussion of how he had lost faith in a God, and how other sons were leaving or even beating their fathers with no care enlightens the reader to the true despair that surrounded the people that inhabited these camps. Also, his description of himself in a mirror as “a corpse” that “gazed back at me” installs in the reader the overwhelming sense of how this event so completely ravaged the human soul.

Why must humans be either inherently good or inherently evil? The narrative Night by Elie Wiesel illustrates humanity in one of the darkest periods of history, to abandon humanity to survive vs keeping it from spiraling down into hopelessness. As Eliezer struggles to survive against starvation and abuse, he also grapples with the destruction of his faith in God’s justice and battles with the darker sides of himself.Throughout the novel, Eliezer feels a conflict between protecting his father who poses as a burden and giving himself the best chance of survival. The narrative also brings up a very important question, ‘’Are humans inherently good or evil?’’ How can we ever compare the kindness of the French girl who healed Eliezer 's wounds to the SS officers that had beaten him cruelly? We can not, and not just for that reason alone. Are humans born inherently good and became soiled by the filth and corrupt of the world, conditioning them to forget their morals and turn against each-other? Or are humans born inherently evil judging by their capability to commit heinous crimes and there is no goodness in this world, just people who are far less evil than others? In my opinion, humans are born neither inherently good or evil. It’s not as if Eliezer was born with a moral compass, he was raised with high morals and to serve God (and abandoning him when he feels God is cruel to let them suffer). His experience in the camps allows him to explore the darker concepts in humanity

At midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group looks at flames rising above huge ovens and gags at the stench of burning flesh. Guards wielding billy clubs force Elie's group through a selection of those fit to work and those who face a grim and improbable future. Elie and his father lie about their ages and depart with other hardy men to Auschwitz. Elie's mother and three sisters disappear into Birkenau, the death camp. After viewing infants being tossed in a burning pit, Elie is now against God, who remains silent. Elie and his father manage through all the pain and horrific sights and fight through it all. In the novel “Night” Elie Wiesel shows dehumanization in many occurrences throughout the book. Pg 13 “ The gestapo had threatened to shoot him if he talked.” Pg 36 “ He was weeping bitterly. I thought he was crying with joy at still being alive.” Pg. 53 “ Beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more

The books Night, by Elie Wiesel, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne are two intriguing books by themselves. However, when you put them together you gain an improved perspective about the Holocaust. You also get see how people were affected by it, how they reacted to it, and what their opinions were about it. These two books contain many similarities and differences, but they go so well together.

In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel goes through the worst experience of his life along with his father- they are taken to Nazi-German concentration camps during the Holocaust. Wiesel turns his painful story into an acclaimed work of nonfiction. The Jews lost their humanity through prolonged periods of starvation, beatings, murders, separation of families, and theft of their belongings. Throughout the book, dehumanization grows and slowly begins to exhaust the Jews while they are also drowned in fear and witnessing millions of deaths taking place. He does this by conveying how the fire not only consumed the lives of many but their fears and hope as well, dehumanizing all Jews. Through the symbolism of fire, Wiesel conveys how the violence of the

Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on giving the reader a precise understanding of the Holocaust from the perspective of a man who endured it. In order to vividly describe the situation, Wiesel uses specific words or phrases to signify the importance and value behind it. Wiesel writes, “Night. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes” (Wiesel 21). “Night” is used abundantly throughout the book. In today’s American society, night is for rejuvenation, peace,

After nearly two years of misery, a young boy finally saw the first ray of hope on the horizon; the Americans had finally arrived, and the Nazis were gone. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel shares his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Wiesel was one of the minority of Jews to survive the Holocaust during World War II. His family did not make it through with him, and this had lasting effects. Wiesel’s identity changed completely during his experiences in Auschwitz; he lost his faith in God and he became indifferent to his survival and the survival of his family members. Despite these hardships, however, he ultimately became a stronger person than he was before.

About two-thirds of Jewish people living in Europe at the time of World War II were killed by Nazis. Elie Wiesel’s novel, Night, is about a teenage boy who was taken with his family to Auschwitz and through many of the other concentration camps. Night walks you through all the horrible and tragic events that Elie and all the other people had to endure. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses several powerful, sad, and horrifying images to demonstrate some of the horrors that occurred during the holocaust.

As the famous journalist Iris Chang once said, “As the Nobel Laureate warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” After experiencing the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust, Eliezer Wiesel narrated “Night”. Eliezer wrote “Night” in an attempt to prevent something similar to the Holocaust from happening again, by showing the audience what the consequences are that come from becoming a bystander. Elie illustrated numerous themes by narrating the state of turmoil he was in during the Holocaust. In Night, Eliezer provided insight into what he experienced in order to teach the unaware audience about three themes; identity, silence, and faith.

At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.

Forty-two years after entering the concentration camp for the first time, Elie Wiesel remarked, “Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope” (Nobel Lecture 1). This means a lot from someone who endured almost two years of the terror in the WWII concentration camps. During these two years, Elie endured the sadness of leaving his former life and faith behind, the pain of living off of scraps of bread, and the trepidation of the “selections”, where he almost lost his father. He watched the hanging of innocent people, was beat by Kapos and guards time after time, and marched in a death march right after having a foot surgery. Through all of this, he survived because he remained hopeful. Hope was all the Jewish people

There are many important themes and overtones to the book Night, by Eliezer Wiesel. One of the major themes from the book includes the protagonist, and author of his memoire, Elie Wiesel’s ever changing relationship with God. An example of this is when Moche the Beadle asked Elie an important question that would change his life forever, as the basis of his passion and aptitude for studying the ancient texts and teachings of Judaism, “When Moche the Beadle asked Elie why he prayed, Elie couldn 't think of an answer that truly described his faith, and thought, "a strange question, why did I live, why did I breathe?" (Wiesel 14).