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Evil In Night By Elie Wiesel

1170 Words5 Pages

Night is a beautiful blunt, raw memoir written by Elie Wiesel, covering his experience in the Holocaust. Night is an influential and emotionally striking story about power being used for evil, resulting in the death of tens of millions people. When discussing the holocaust, it is generally about the horrendous crimes committed, but not so much the fact the Nazi's saw what they were doing as perfectly acceptable; it is evident that because of the Nazi regime was (and their beliefs), they believed murder and torture was not to be looked down upon. This is a prime example that personal beliefs and values dictate what defines evil to each individual. As an example of how personal beliefs shape our views of evil, look at people who follow biblical rule (due to personal belief). …show more content…

Nonetheless, according to the varying definitions of evil, what occurred during the Holocaust was absolutely evil.
People were killed in concentration camps "'...like cattle in the slaughterhouse."' (Wiesel, Elie. Night, Page 31, Translated by Marion Wiesel, Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). In previous sentences of the book Night a prisoner explained to Elie and his father that the flames they saw off in the distance were coming from gas chambers, the very gas chambers that Jewish people were taken to to be ‘"Burned to a cinder! Turned to ashes!"' (Wiesel, Elie. Night, Page 31). In the narrow and broad definitions of evil, what the Nazi's do to the Jewish people is undoubtedly despicable and evil.
The Nazi's also starved the jews until in some cases, they died. Elie had mentioned his own account of starvation when he says: "The bread, the soup- those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.” (Wiesel, Elie. Night, Page 52). When people become deprived of food, they're body

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