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. Elie leaves with a loss of faith, that although strong at the beginning, only to be taken away over time. This can be viewed as the small grain of hope that helped him to stay alive in these brutal living conditions. Elie Weisel recalls himself …show more content…
God was the reason Elie kept hope and strength in the cattle cars and now was ‘abandoning’ him in these death camps. It was here the realization about what Elie was faced with truly began to outweigh his hope in life. Prior to departing for camp, he stated, “I looked at my house in which I spent years seeking God, fasting to hasten the coming of the messiah imagining what my life would be like later. Yet I felt sadness. My mind was empty.”(Page 19) This displayed that prior to migrating; he still carried a slight hope in what would happen, moreover showing how at this moment prior to export he has begun to feel lost without God. Consequently, Elie lived through many horrific things at the camp, including, the loss of his mother, minimal clothing, low food rationing, and harmful beatings that threatened his daily life. At this point in life Elie began to put his faith into …show more content…
Without faith he lost one of his key reasons for survival. He endured sights such as the hanging of many people, including a young child along with the mass murder of many fragile adults on a daily basis. Near the end of his time in German control Elie states, “a prayer to a God in which I no longer believed,” (Page 91), showing he is trickling out empty prayers assuming no answer will come. Weisel is so accustomed towards making prayers that he continues to produce them, although filled with emptiness and no faith towards the future. Furthermore, these events permit someone so young to carry the question of, why can anyone do this? Why does not the all-powerful God answer? The faith Weisel had shown be viewed as commendable no matter how small as that is what kept him going from day to