Night is an incredible first person account of the horrors that Elie Wiesel went through as a teenager in the Holocaust. Wiesel has spoken about his experiences through writing, but also through speeches around the world. In 1986 he gave a speech after receiving the Nobel Prize. In the speech he said “Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.” This gives insight as to why he wrote the book Night. Wiesel wrote Night to provide the future generations with an account of the Holocaust so that the future would never forget one of the most terrible acts that humans have committed in recorded history.
One of the many ideas that Wiesel covers in his novel is the idea that ignorance is dangerous. The first time this occurs is when Moshe the Beadle is trying to tell the townspeople to leave because there is great danger, but in the book “[The] people not only refused to believe his tales, the refused to listen.”(Wiesel, 7) The people (mainly the Jews) were ignorant of the Holocaust previously, and had no idea what things had befallen hundreds of thousands of Jews during the war. Because of their ignorance they refused to believe that such a horrible thing was about to befall them, so they did not leave the country. They did not realize what the
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In his 1986 speech he says, “ Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”(118) When he talks about this idea he refers to what happened in the Holocaust. With the multitudes of German towns and cities knowing of the existance of the camps, and a general idea of who, and what was inside them. His point is that if the people all tried to stop what was happening, or at the very least told the outside world what was happening, there could have been many lives