Have you ever been through something traumatic or so life changing that you have doubt the truthness of your faith? Throughout Night, Elie Wiesel, the author shows several instances of his loss of religion throughout the book. Wiesel demonstrates his loss of faith through the experiences he has while in the Nazi concentration camps. Wiesel had many traumatic experiences while being held captive in the concentration camps. Those included his refusal to recite the Kaddish prayer for the dead.
It's hard to believe that innocent people were being tortured and killed based on their religion. During the Holocaust about 6 million Jews were killed. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, Elie, a young religious boy who wrote about his experience during the Holocaust. Throughout his experience Elie’s relationship with God develops from being strong prior to the Holocaust, to weakening when arriving at the camps, and completely losing his faith in God at the end.
“Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” This quote explains how traumatizing the first night of the next two years would be like for Eliezer. In Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, he retells his horrific story about him and his father enduring the challenges of multiple concentration camps. Eliezer changes throughout this book by, questioning his faith, learning self-preservation, and realizing that evil is worse than he could imagine. Primarily, Eliezer believed in an all powerful God, but after he experienced the tragedy of the concentration camps, he questions his faith.
The Holocaust affects Jews in a way that seems unimaginable, and most of these effects seem to have been universal experiences; however, in the matter of faith, Jews in the concentration camp described in Elie Wiesel’s Night are affected differently and at different rates. The main character, Elie, loses his faith quickly after the sights he witnesses (as well as many others); other Jews hold on much longer and still pray in the face of total destruction. In the beginning, all of the Jews are more or less equally faithful in their God and religion.
Eliezer couldn’t understand why God would let such horrible things that he faced during the holocaust happen. Eliezer would sometimes question God’s existence because he was taught God was everywhere, so good was everywhere as well. Eliezer loses his faith in God, but still believes there is one at the end of the book. Sources and Methods Elie Wiesel didn’t use any sources in his book Night, it was written about his own experience during the holocaust.
“You don’t understand... You cannot understand. I was saved miraculously. I succeeded in coming back. Where did I get my strength?
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. ”(Wiesel 32). Author Elie Wiesel uses metaphor and hyperbole, to exaggerate Eliezer’s loss of God and Eliezer’s dreams. Elie also uses the form of repetition, repeating “Never shall I forget” after every thought to highlight an emotion or concept or develop a sense of intensity.
“It isn't fair how I doubt him, and I wonder if he'll ever gather that my loss of faith extends further than I'd ever known it would, severing lines of trust and leveling my confidence like a city-flattening tornado.” This is the quotes which from Tammara, Webber. Have you imagined stay in a horrible environment like camp and got injure all most every day and Lord still being generous to those German who hurt them? As government started an act to kick out all Jew, no one believed what would happen to them next.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie has to face many problems during the Holocaust. He lost his identity and his faith towards God. Elie is focusing on surviving and saving his father while they are in camps, and marching through the cold winter snow. Elie has to live through the trauma and tragedy of the Holocaust that had a major impact on Elie’s identity and his faith. His identity changed as time went on and on, he had lost sight of himself and his faith.
The Holocaust was a genocide by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews, as well as millions of others. Night is a novel by Elie Wiesel about his experience in the holocaust. The Holocaust forever changed Elie's life and family. Wiesel's memoir focuses on his experiences during World War II focusing on the themes of faith, survival, and regret.
“I want to know how you keep holding on and believe again or how you never stop believing to begin with.” These words by Jessica Watson perfectly accentuate the battle that Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, struggles with throughout the novel. In the village of Sighet, Romania, a young Wiesel is enthralled by Jewish mysticism and believes the existence of an omnipotent God. One day, however, the Jewish people of Sighet are forced to live in supervised ghettos, and later brought to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Wiesel suffers with the physical torture of forced labor and hunger, as well as the mental and emotional torture of losing his family.
Diminishing Faith The Nazis enforced horrendous cruelty upon Elie Wiesel and the rest of the Jewish people, therefore causing Elie’s faith in God to go from complete, to partial, to absent. The German soldiers chipped away at the Jews’ needs one by one, breaking them down to precisely bodies. In the beginning of the story, Elie shares his remembrance of being completely devoted to God, and even wanting to learn more about the Kabbalah religion than his father allowed.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, faith is “belief and trust in God”(“Faith.”). This faith permeated young Elie Wiesel’s life before he and his family were sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust, and is an idea that is omnipresent throughout his novel, Night. As the novel opens, we see how absolutely devoted young Wiesel is to studying the Jewish religion. His belief in an omnipotent, benevolent God is unconditional, and he cannot imagine life without this divine power. He is eager, optimistic, and he even deviates from his father's recommendation by remaining in the synagogue after the others leave and he finds Moshe the Beadle to guide him in his studies.
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.
Faith or Fiction? Night is a memoir with a great focus towards faith and a child’s questioning of its existence. Elie Wiesel begins to trust God at a very young age, which left him needing to learn about his Jewish faith and beliefs. Once arriving in the concentration camps, Elie is faced with many questions towards how God could put such faith filled people through this dark tragedy. Faith in God is completely lost by Elie after surviving long term torture and abuse inside the German ‘worker’ camps.
