Have you ever thought about how it would feel to be in a concentration camp during the Holocaust? The book Night written by Elie Wiesel, it is about a 16 year old named Eliezer. He is a Holocaust survivor and tells about his time in the concentration camps. It is in first person about how he felt, what he saw and what had happened to him. Hope is good until you lose it.
The very beginning of his speech starts out by showing his credibility to the audience and what he has been through and how it affected his view on the world. “Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe's beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald (1). This verifies for the audience where he has been and background knowledge on he grew and what he experienced in his life. Similarly throughout the speech he talks about his time in Auschwitz and the shares some of the horrors of his experience, things he had to endure. Ethos is well used to convey the
Life is full of good and bad experiences, but you don’t always have control of what happens. That can be scary sometimes and it depends on how you handle it as to whether you get out of that situation. In the memoir Night written by Elie Wiesel, Eli, a teenager had been taken away from his home and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Night is the scary record of Elie Wiesel’s memories of the death of his own family and the death of his own innocence as he tries to fight his way out of the concentration camp. Over the course of the book, Eli changes from a believer in God living in bearable conditions to someone who has become profane because of the situation he’s been put in.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. " Hope and an optimistic attitude are characteristics of a rational and humane mindset. Documenting how these ideals change throughout a period of time in writing can be done through various means of rhetoric including figurative language. In Elie Wiesel 's personal memoir Night, he incorporates similes and metaphors to effectively convey how the victims ' humanity deteriorated throughout the course of the Holocaust. Wiesel 's figurative language at the beginning of the novel conveys how the Jewish people followed commendable politesse and practiced reasonable behavior early on in the Holocaust.
At the beginning of Night, Elie was someone who believed fervently in his religion. His experiences at Auschwitz and other camps, such as Birkenau and Buna have affected his faith immensely. Elie started to lose his faith when he and his father arrived at Birkenau. They saw the enormous flames rising from a ditch, with people being thrown in.
Elie Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor who strongly believes that people need to share their stories about the Holocaust with others. Elie Wiesel was in concentration camps for about half of his teen years along with his father. After being the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust he resolved to make what really happened more well-known. Elie Wiesel wrote dozens of books and submitted an essay titled “A God Who Remembers” to the book This I Believe. The essay focused on Elie Wiesel’s belief that those who have survived the Holocaust should not suppress their experiences but must share them so history will not repeat itself.
In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel strives to inform his audience of the unbelievable atrocities of the Holocaust in order to prevent them from ever again responding to inhumanity and injustice with silence and neutrality. The structure or organization of Wiesel’s speech, his skillful use of the rhetorical appeals of pathos and ethos, combined with powerful rhetorical devices leads his audience to understand that they must never choose silence when they witness injustice. To do so supports the oppressors. Wiesel’s speech is tightly organized and moves the ideas forward effectively. Wiesel begins with humility, stating that he does not have the right to speak for the dead, introducing the framework of his words.
Wiesel pinpoints the indifference of humans as the real enemy, causing further suffering and lost to those already in peril. Wiesel commenced the speech with an interesting attention getter: a story about a young Jewish from a small town that was at the end of war liberated from Nazi rule by American soldiers. This young boy was in fact himself. The first-hand experience of cruelty gave him credibility in discussing the dangers of indifference; he was a victim himself.
Memory Blessing or Curse Religious wars fought over beliefs were always fought between two sides and one is thought to have a winner and a loser victor and victim. In Elie Wiesel’s Noble speech “Hope, Despair, and Memory” he describes his experiences during a religious war that were more of an overpowering of people than a war no clash of metal, no hard fought fight, just the rounding up and killing of people with different beliefs that barely put up a fight. Elie Wiesel the author of the Noble lecture “Hope, Despair, and Memory” implores us to respond to the human suffering and injustice that happened in the concentration camps by remembering the past, so that the past cannot taint the future through his point of view, cultural experiences, as well as his use of rhetorical appeals. Wiesel uses his cultural experiences and point of view sot that he could prove he spent time and survived the concentration camps in order to communicate that the past must be remembered that way it cannot destroy the future, he spent time in a concentration camps and he
The speech, Mr. Wiesel showed to the audience that he knows of these events firsthand because he shared his own personal suffering and established ethos by telling the story in first person. He argued about the guilt of past violent events and proclaimed that said events could have been avoided if humanity had been less indifferent. He stated that had someone have intervened earlier, these events could have been avoided. Nonetheless, Mr. Wiesel still showed gratitude to those who intervened and fought those responsible for the hardship of himself and his people. However, he still did not understand why they did not do an intervention at an earlier time to avoid the suffering of thousands of people.
In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.
In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when he questioned God, ¨Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled, he caused thousands of children to burn his Mass graves?¨(Wiesel 68). Overall, Wiesel does not follow the words of God and is not believing in him anymore because he thinks God is the one thatś letting all the inhumanity occur. One theme in Night is that inhumanity can cause disbelief or incredulity.
Hope is a helpful tool to push people through the hardest times in life. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, there are numerous examples of hope helping people and revitalizing their confidence. People used hope to help them through rough times. People hope that friends and family are still alive. Also hope that the Front liberates the camps and frees everyone.
Wiesel brings out syntax for the ending of his speech but also incorporates pathos wrapping it all back together with the sadness and pity on all of us for the harmful silence done to the jews in the holocaust. Syntax was the most obvious rhetorical device used because you can physically see how it is being presented differently than the rest but also sending a message and not being so formal about it. Pathos was a very huge part to Wiesel’s whole entire speech as he was constantly trying to turn everyones thoughts and perspectives to what he was exactly seeing in his own eyes. Elie Wiesel wanted to show the world the horrible act of indifference and how it has personally affected him as a child and for his whole life growing up. Wiesel manages to create many viewpoints and to throw us in his shoes for us to understand the inhumanity of the ones had no sympathy towards the jews during the holocaust.
Paradox, parallelism, personification, repetition, rhetorical question, pathos. You may ask yourself: what importance do these words have? These words are rhetorical devices used to develop a claim. A person who used these important devices was Elie Wiesel. In his 1986 Nobel Peace Acceptance Speech, Elie Wiesel develops the claim that remaining silent on human sufferings makes us just as guilty as those who inflicted the suffering and remain guilty for not keeping the memory of those humans alive.
