Attachments In Night By Elie Wiesel

791 Words4 Pages

Norman Cousins once said, “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” The author of Night, Eliezer Wiesel, was a young boy when he was taken to Auschwitz. He lost his parents and his youngest sister. He lost everything he cared about and, perhaps the most overwhelming, his identity. Wiesel’s story is a painful, horrendous, and wicked display of what one human can do to another, or in this case, what one can do six million others. His story tells us of his loss, and how he dealt with it. Humans, as a species, form attachments to one another, and to things that provide a sense of self-identification, and when those attachments are broken, we struggle to find meaning in the life we are currently living. …show more content…

Wiesel does not recognize and cannot identify as the person he sees before him, because his identity was stolen from him. We have all heard the saying that we are all unique and special in our own way, and how no two people are the same. We spend years developing our identity, and becoming our own person, because all of us start out the same way: a small, helpless, and vulnerable infant. Our identity is defined by many things, but usually one main thing stands out from the rest. Wiesel, for example, was devoted to his God, and when he lost faith, he was torn apart. He no longer had a sense of indistinguishability, because as he grew up, he learned right versus wrong through his belief in