Connotation In Night By Elie Wiesel

Living with the memories of such a horrific event like the Holocaust is challenging enough, but having to write and relive this tragedy once more is almost too much to ask. But we must, as staying silent is even worse. The horrific event that included the mass murder of 6 million Jews and other "undesirables," such as Gypsies and homosexuals, known as the Holocaust, left few survivors, but many of those that made it out were silent for a long time. Why relive the past if it is so horrible that one does not even want to think about it? Once some survivors decided to talk about the Holocaust and their experiences, another problem arose. Everyday words were not enough. They could not describe what really happened in such a horrible event. So,

One example of this is shown when Elie Wiesel uses the words condemned and transformed to describe the events of living forever with God and the murdering of children. These words are used differently because living forever and especially living with God is an event that most people would say is pleasurable. People would say that one would be lucky to live with God and not condemned or forced to live with Him. This word choice shows how the Holocaust changed people in indescribable ways so they have to reference what were once positive events with negative words. Likewise, Elie says, "Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky." Transformed has many connotations to it, but when saying that children were transformed into smoke, Elie is saying that they were killed but he did not say it in a harsh way. He used the euphemism that they were transformed not killed. In addition, Primo Levi uses words like hunger, tiredness, fear, pain, and winter to have different meanings to people who were involved in the Holocaust versus everyday people. Everyday people would not experience the hunger, pain, tiredness, and fear that people involved in the Holocaust did. These people may think that they are tired so they will go to sleep, but to people from the Holocaust, being tired means that their bodies are physically tired and that they might not be able to go on. This same idea applies to every word except the word winter. Winter to a free man is a word that means sitting inside and being warm with something or someone that keeps you warm. To a Holocaust survivor, this word fails to say the brutality of a harsh and cold winter, it fails to say all the troubles that are brought on because of a season that is below freezing. The word fails to say all the horrible things involved with its season such as ice and dangers involved in the