Teagan Karlowicz
Grosel
L&L 8
24 January 2023
Night: a Heartwrenching Story of Immense Change “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (Wiesel 115). At just 15 Eliezer Wiesel gets taken to Auschwitz, then Birkenau, and eventually Buna where he spends most of his time during the Holocaust. During his time at Buna, he is essentially starved and beaten repeatedly. Nevertheless, he survives and is liberated in a camp called Buchenwald. Throughout the horrifying events of the Holocaust, Elie undergoes a plethora of changes including physical, spiritual, and emotional transformations. During his time in the camps, Elie goes through many physical changes. These distortions in his appearance are caused in large part by starvation,
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Elie’s emotions throughout Night can be broadly categorized by anger, acceptance, and depression. Anger is expressed a multitude of times throughout the book, most notably at the very beginning of his family being moved to a ghetto when he writes, “That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.” (Wiesel 19). This is the very first time Elie expresses any anger or outright hatred for anything throughout Night, it’s his first rebellion against the idea that everything will blow over and he and his family will be fine. We see acceptance very shortly after that when he says, “It was as though madness had infected all of us. We gave up.” (26). This takes place when he had his family are being taken to Auschwitz and eventually Birkenau, but it shows that very early on Elie abandoned his anger and opted to give up instead, sort of giving into the very madness he says infects all of them. We then see depression in Elie most prominently when his father dies and he writes, “I shall not describe my life during that period. It no longer mattered. Since my father’s death, nothing mattered to me anymore … I spent my days in total idleness.”(113). Though he exhibits this idol behavior this is the first time it is brought directly to the reader's attention and probably the very last time Elie ever mentions his emotion at all. These changes were undeniable due to his time spent in the