Imagine losing everything that you once had, your friends, family, all of your possessions, and everything else that once belonged to you. This is what happened to Elie Wiesel when his family was taken from him during the Holocaust. Wiesel lived in a small religious town. He was sent to Auschwitz and then sent to Buchenwald for his religion (Jewish). A little while after the war, he moved to France and then to the United States to become a professor at Boston University. Before he was ever sent to any concentration camps, he buried his watch at his old house in Sighet, Romania. Later, after the war he went back and unburied his watch, but then ended up leaving it there because he felt like a thief. He hoped that somebody would find it and then it would force them to recall the past. In “The Watch” by Elie Wiesel, he walks away from his watch to forget about the past and move on. He also moves on to forgive what others have done to him. The final thing that he does in this story is he reburries his watch to show others we should remember/not forget the past. Wiesel shows through the protagonists’ forgiveness, leaving his watch, and moving on to show that it’s you should forgive, but not forget what has happened to you.
In the story “The Watch” the main character decides to walk away from his watch to forget about the past and move on. In the story he states, “I turn around, retrace my steps… Holding my breath, my eyes refusing to cry, I place the watch back into its box,