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Elie Wiesel's Night

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The horrors of war can change even the kindest of individuals, reshaping them in drastic ways. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, people experience the tragedies of war within camps, cities, and each other. Wiesel shares his experiences of his losses in the war, where he lost everything and changed the person he was to the person he needed to be. Night provides the grueling suffering that Elie experiences in the war leading to his human losses; the loss of faith, the loss of sanity, and the loss of emotion Elie Wiesel discusses the existence of god in a world in which death is a common occurrence which makes Elie ponder the existence of god which he admires. As Elie first witnesses the crematories, he questions God's silence, stating, 'For the first time, I felt anger rising within me... …show more content…

This marks a significant change from his devoting belief to a deep loss crisis of faith, as he comes to the contradiction between his religious teachings and his brutal experience. The world in flames cannot have a God. This belief was now a possible reality for Elie. But people's hearts require a light in which they need to believe, which is why as Elie saw people praying, even with the experiences that the people had endured, he explained to himself that “My eyes had opened and I was alone in a world without God, without man., but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. Among these men assembled for prayer" (Pg68). The existence of a god is now less than the power of the human, which the god was supposed to be watching over. The faith of mankind is stronger than God's power over humanity as he now believes that he wields more control over his own survival rather than God. As Elie Wiesel endures the relentless violence of the concentration camps, he begins to lose his grip on

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Night was written in a young boy’s point of view about his family’s hardships and experiences through the holocaust. This book is based off the 1940s. At this time, the holocaust was coming to an end. The main setting in the book is a series of concentration camps: Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald. There is an abundance of historical information about these camps, especially the more popular ones like Auschwitz. 1937, the Buchenwald concentration camp opens.

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Six to ten million people died during the Holocaust all because of Hitler. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, the reader learns about the difficulties, from a survivor’s point of view, in the concentration camp. Wiesel experiences what it’s like to be beaten down physically, mentally, and emotionally. The SS guards stripped him of his identity and religion. In the beginning of the story, Wiesel believed very deeply in God.

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In the book, “Night”, Elie's story starts out with a perfect life with his loving family. Then things took a drastic turn as the Germans invaded. They captured and killed many Jews. Now all that is left for Elie is to survive.

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Elie Wiesel saw no sense at being and keeping faithfulness to God. A book of life and death does not rests in the hands of God, but in the hands of the executioner. Author expressed himself from leaving his ancestral faith, showed hatred referring to the Creator, whom he loved and worshiped before finding himself in the camp. He (God) became a stranger; sometimes considered him an enemy. Meanwhile, religious life in Auschwitz was very intense, despite the enormity of humiliation, slave labor and fear for survival during selection to the gas chambers.

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Eleven million people were murdered in the Holocaust, six million of which were Jews who were killed solely for their beliefs. This terrible genocide is recounted through the eyes of Elie Wiesel in his memoir, Night. As the novel progresses, Wiesel's faith in his God falters, due to the physical and emotional suffering he endured as a Jew in the Holocaust. During the first couple of chapters of Night, Wiesel’s faith and dedication to his religion are very strong.

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“Night” by Elie Wiesel is a very heavy and serious book due to the fact that it has a lot of graphic descriptions of what happened at Auschwitz. In the book he speaks about how when he was just a teenager, he was sent to concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald with his family. He talks a lot about how he struggled with his faith, specifically in the quote “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.” This quote shows how devastating and heartbreaking his experience was at Auschwitz. He is showing us that during his time at Auschwitz, it did not only affect his body, but also his mental and spiritual states.

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In the beginning his faith in God is absolute, he grew up thinking God is everywhere, all the time. He also grows up with the idea that God is good and since God is good, and God is everywhere, the world must therefore be good. Elie’s faith in the goodness of the world is shaken by the cruelty

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Elie Wiesel lived through a rough concentration camp that involved different parts where innocent human beings died. His reference to “...they listen, they cry, they warn” explains how those who died are still around with them through the Holocaust and help them be warned about the events that happened. Elie shares that the Jews suffered in inexplicable ways by how they were told that they were taking a shower but instead were taken into a chamber where Zyklon B was exposed, disease exposure in locks, and they even had to create certain things for the Nazis’. Jewish families were separated into different camps but few had survived in the Auschwitz camp, where Elie went to. Although these horrors were hard, Wiesel learned to stay calm and heard

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Oftentimes, the effects of traumatic experiences can transcend the importance or the gravity of original beliefs. With every passing day, Elie is seeing more and more innocent infants, children, men, and women dying all around him, simultaneously. However, as the survivors around him congregate and continue to pray to God on their own volition he is thoroughly confused. With the amount of deaths around him, he questions everything, and thinks aloud.

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And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed.” (Wiesel 91). This quote demonstrates the internal struggle between Elie and his faith. He is slowly losing his belief in God, who was once the meaning and center of his life. This quote shows how the extreme circumstances of the Holocaust can lead to the questioning and loss of once-strong bonds of faith, ultimately changing one's life forever.

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Wiesel reveals the truth that when surrounded by many horrific events, it can lead to one 's loss of religious faith. This is exemplified in Elie’s lack of following religious traditions, many questioning God’s existence, and people believing that they no longer need God to help them survive these brutal conditions.

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Elie Wiesel is not only a talented author but a survivor of the holocaust who documented his horrific experiences in his memoir “Night”. In the beginning of the book Elie Wiesel was one of the most religious people in his town of Saghet who had a dream of living a monastic life. However, as a result of the harrowing injustices he endured he continuously lost faith in his religion. Within the book the reader is reminded again and again that when extreme adversity is experienced, faith is often lost.

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For Elie, it seems the commitment to ‘faith’ is far bigger than his own personal commitment to his faith, but a testament to his desire to explore and articulate the fundamental value of faith for the human race. He doesn’t measure faith or its importance through his experiences both good and horrific, but seemingly the notion that faith is something a bit different than the usual definition of a belief and trust in God based on evidence but without total proof. Elie starts his journey with the notion that “...there is faith – which is childish; trust—which is vain; and illusion—which is dangerous. We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekhinah's flame.” (Wiesel 13-14).

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Chapter One Summary: In chapter one of Night by Elie Wiesel, the some of the characters of the story are introduced and the conflict begins. The main character is the author because this is an autobiographical novel. Eliezer was a Jew during Hitler’s reign in which Jews were persecuted. The book starts out with the author describing his faith.

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