While reading the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, I found the main character, Elie having an epiphany on page 115 of the book. Here, Elie finds himself finally free from the Nazis and the concentration camp, looking at himself in the mirror for the first time since the ghetto. Elie said, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” Although the narrator does not come out and directly state it, I believe it is at this moment that he truly understands what he has been subjected to and endured.
The Novel ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel is about Elie and his experiences during the Holocaust. In this novel, Elie struggles to maintain his humanity. Some things that show his loss of humanity include the relationship between him and his god, the train ride to Auschwitz, and the killing for bread. In the Novel, Elie’s relationship between him and his God changes.
In the book Night, the main character, Elie Wiesel sacrificed a lot. As a child, Elie had to sacrifice the life he had once lived with his family after being taken to the concentration camp. As soon as he gets to the camp he starts to make these sacrifices, not only for him, but also for his father. When the Nazi’s were going through the women and children, Elie lied about his age so that he could stay with his father and work. Elie did not know at the time, but making this decision saved his life.
Many Jews who considered themselves staunch believers in G-d, even in the face of tragedy, had their faith tested, and often destroyed, after experiencing the Holocaust. Many could not sustain faith in a G-d who would allow the Jews to suffer such horrific events on such a large and organized scale. The world knows Elie Wiesel, one of the most famous and prolific Holocaust survivors, for his brave and candid writings about the Shoah. His book Night documents his experience in Nazi concentration camps as a teenager during the Holocaust. Before the war begins, Wiesel is a devout Jew who refuses to defy or even question G-d. Throughout the novel, his faith stretches, morphs, and almost disappears.
Victim of Isis are experiencing death, suffering, and with no hope in sight. But the horrific events was not happening in the middle east during present times, but during world war II in Germany. In the book Night, Elie Wiesel explains his experiences during the holocaust. Elie Wiesel wrote this book so he can inform people who weren’t there or didn’t know what happened to prevent this from happening again. Elie Wiesel assert this by show loss of faith, brutality and suffering Elie Wiesel, for a period of time of his life, experienced many things witnessing many deaths and malnourishment for years.
While at Auschwitz, Elie is branded with the number A-7713, his new name. Stein, family member of the Wiesel’s, finds Elie and his father and asked about his family, Elie lies and reassures him they are alive. 5. Upon arriving at Buna, the men shower, receive new clothes, and are given tents to sleep in. Because of Elie’s gold tooth crown, he is sent to the dentist to have it removed, but then pretends to be sick.
Again, Wiesel shows the connection between humanity and mortality with the death of his father near the end of the book. When Elie’s father realizes he is dying, he, “began talking, faster and faster, afraid of running out of time before he could tell [Elie] everything.”(108). The threat of death affects how people live. A sense of urgency exists that only humans feel because they understand death. As a result of a healthy knowledge of death, people make hard decisions in order to use their time wisely.
Night In Night by Elie Wiesel the Jews suffer greatly because of the Holocaust. The Germans show great prejudice against the Jews. This unfounded hatred causes the Jews to experience a loss of innocence once at Auschwitz. The Germans forced them to become people they aren’t.
No more was he Eliezer Wiesel, but just another number. “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” (Wiesel 42) The longer the young boy was imprisoned, the more his faith began to deteriorate. As Elie’s faith withered away, he started to become more inhumane than ever before.
Traumatic experiences often lead to a decimation of humanity around people. This causes people to distrust everything, sometimes even themselves. In the beginning of the story, Elie explains his general mindset about himself during the time of his depression. The Holocaust, which is such a negative turning point in his life, causes him to lose the will to live as more people were quickly dying around him as well. He recalls the events, and tries to determine the purpose of his survival.
Upon Elie’s arrival at Auschwitz he was punctured with tattoo, immediately being reduced to a number. “I quickly became A-7713. After that I had no other name” (31). Using symbolism to indicate the inhumanity of the concentration camps, Elie demonstrates just how apparent and instantaneous it was to lose a sense of identity. Using the word “quickly” proved that dehumanization was not a lengthy or lingering process, the goal was to break them then and there.
PBS, North Carolina, estimates that the average human makes 35,000 decisions a day. However, what if those decisions were the difference between living and dying? In Elie’s case, his every move is the difference between living and dying. Elie is a young Romanian Jew living in World War II. He shares the hardships and horrors he endures while in the ghetto and at Nazi concentration camps where the Jews are constantly alienated and treated terribly.
During World War II, the Nazis destroyed millions of people’s lives including the life of a Jewish boy named Eliezer Wiesel. He was just 15 years old when the Nazis took him and his family from their home and forced them to live in the concentration camp, Auschwitz. During Elie’s stay at Auschwitz, he experiences unimaginable pain. He suffers through starvation, hypothermia, mental abuse, physical abuse, and worst of all he watches his father die. These external conflicts that Elie faces cause him to develop big internal conflicts including his struggle with religious faith, his difficulties being a son, and his fight to maintain humanity.
The destiny of an individual is events that happen during a life time ultimately leading to the future. During World War II young Elie Wiesel and his family become a victim of the Nazis’ mission to exterminate all Jews by forcing them into concentration camps. Elie’s life of studying Kabbalah and his family’s simple lifestyle running their business is quickly replaced by the need to survive. Being forced into the concentration camp was not his choice as he was a victim of fate. It was fate that lead to his family being forced into the concentration camp as it was not something they could choose.
The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.
