Elie Wiesel was one of only hundreds of people that escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. Very few were lucky to escape, unlike the millions of others. Elie wrote a novel to tell the terrors of the Nazi Party and what he had experienced in his time there. Due to the atrocities witnessed and experienced during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, a once deeply religious individual, loses his faith in God, himself, and mankind.
Elie Wiesel was a deeply religious person. He believed in god and always looked to him in times of need. He always thought he could rely on god to keep him safe and protect him from anything. After he was sent to concentration camps, he began to lose his faith in god. He once said “But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I
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You had to have the strength and a mindset to be able to stay alive and push forward. People hit each other for making noise and stole from others just to stay alive. There were many bombings and after a while Eli and the other prisoners got used to them. Eli expressed “We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it would have claimed hundreds of inmates’ lives. But we no longer feared death, in any event not this particular death. Every bomb that hit us with joy, gave us renewed confidence.”(60) The prisoners and Elie would be happy if a bomb landed on the blocks so it could kill SS officers or Nazi’s. It was questioned how could man treat other men like an animal and just kill with no feelings, but after a while, Elie knew it would feel great to see death upon those that hurt or killed others. He no longer had faith in mankind and would do what he needed to do to
Throughout the book Elie Wiesel’s thoughts on God change. In the time when the book was taking place, Jews were seen as nothing and were treated terribly. For example in this Graphic Memoir Elie uses her knowledge to compare Jews to beaten dogs. With all this happening, Elie turned to one person he trusted to help him and his family get out of this disastrous situation. Elie was sent to constant concentration camps because she was Jewish.
The people doubted the existence of their God more and more as events happened. After witnessing the execution, Elie is unable to enjoy his soup because of the grim tone created by the hanging the child. While the Nazis intended public hanging as a means to keep prisoners in check, it turns into a dark ritual that makes prisoners less productive. 2. Soon after Elie was transferred
The holocaust makes physical and mental alterations to Elie’s life, and this tells the reader that the people who did this are effective and impacting, also it shows that Elie’s mind is controlled by what he was experiencing. Way back at the start of the book the readers see an adolescent boy who is studying Kabbalah, but when suddenly German officers come to ship the Jewish citizens out of his town, Elie wants to run away. By
The overall theme of Night is faith. In the kickoff we see a young Wiesel who springiness /reserved his time perusal the Talmud and dreamed one twenty-four hour period of perusal the Qabalah . He started off as a boy who had faith and ingenuousness and believed that Idol was everlasting. Wiesel teaches me of the emotional and physical pain the prisoners at the camp felt. It teaches us not to take things as something that will never go away and in a religious - point of view teaches us to always have hope no matter how hard one situation is.
Faith influences everyone; whether it be faith in a god, a person, or one's own self, faith is ever present. It is one of the most powerful things in all of history; it migrated thousands of people, killed millions, and influences laws in every society. During World War II, the Nazi party of Germany killed up to 6 million people of the Jewish religion. Some of these Jews maintained their faith while they were being killed, some started to break from it, and many lost it completely. If their god was the reason they were being persecuted, how could they have faith in him?
People in concentration camps were faced with the worst predicaments imaginable, how could someone possibly stay faithful to their religion? Motifs are recurring dominant ideas or distinctive features to symbolize importance and impact the theme. In the case of Night, motifs are used to display the unquestionable horror of the Holocaust. By looking at the theme of Struggle to Maintain Faith in the memoir Night, one can see that author Elie Wiesel used ‘Night’ and ‘Eyes’ as motifs to demonstrate the difficulty of religion and hope in grueling times, which is important because many people often struggle with their religion. Elie Wiesel used ‘eyes’ as a motif for Night.
At the beginning of Night, Elie was someone who believed fervently in his religion. His experiences at Auschwitz and other camps, such as Birkenau and Buna have affected his faith immensely. Elie started to lose his faith when he and his father arrived at Birkenau. They saw the enormous flames rising from a ditch, with people being thrown in.
Chapter 5 During the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel changes from a Spiritual and a boy with faith, to a cold hearted, spiritually dead emotional man. And throughout chapter we can see how he questions God, and also to do things such as a protest, or a sign to rebel against God. ”Why, but why should I bless him?Every fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his Mass grave? Because in His great might, he had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death?”.
Wiesel changes vastly throughout the book, whether it is his faith in God, his faith in living, or even the way his mind works. In the beginning of his memoir, Wiesel appeared to be faithful to God and the Jewish religion, but during his time in concentration camps, his faith in God wavered tremendously. Before his life was corrupted, he would praise God even when he was being transferred to Auschwitz, but after living in concentration camps, he began to feel rebellious against his own religion. In the book, Elie
“You don’t understand... You cannot understand. I was saved miraculously. I succeeded in coming back. Where did I get my strength?
In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when he questioned God, ¨Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled, he caused thousands of children to burn his Mass graves?¨(Wiesel 68). Overall, Wiesel does not follow the words of God and is not believing in him anymore because he thinks God is the one thatś letting all the inhumanity occur. One theme in Night is that inhumanity can cause disbelief or incredulity.
In the Old Testament Book of Job tries to answer the question, why is there evil, when God exists? Job endures intolerable misery by Satan, Job eventually does not curse God and is in the course of time, awarded twice of the blessings he had in the beginning of these trials. However, the main question is still left answered: why did God grant Job to suffer if he did nothing wrong? In Night, Elie Wiesel lost his faith throughout the trials of the concentration camp, Auschwitz. Wiesel and the Jewish community was and still are perplexed on what could have they done for millions of families were separated, children murdered, and thousands of souls lost.
Elie, once so faithful, is one of the first to lose faith in God due to the horrific sights he sees. After witnessing the bodies of Jewish children being burned, Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). He quite understandably has begun to doubt that his God is with him following the sight of the supposedly chosen people’s bodies being unceremoniously burned. Elie, though, was perhaps not a member of the masses with this belief; in fact, some men were able to hold on to their beliefs despite these horrendous sights. Also near the middle of the book, Wiesel reflects on the faith of other Jews in the face of these events, saying that “some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come.
Religion is something that many people have consistently believed in and turned to in times of need and support. Some of these people rely on their faith more than their own family and friends. Their religion is their entire life and they can’t imagine their lives without it. Imagine a scenario that’s so terrible that God won’t take you out of it. These people will wonder where God is and pray for Him to come.
Elie Wiesel is not only a talented author but a survivor of the holocaust who documented his horrific experiences in his memoir “Night”. In the beginning of the book Elie Wiesel was one of the most religious people in his town of Saghet who had a dream of living a monastic life. However, as a result of the harrowing injustices he endured he continuously lost faith in his religion. Within the book the reader is reminded again and again that when extreme adversity is experienced, faith is often lost.