Forgetting In Elie Wiesel's Night

Forgetting is one of the most complex words to understand and use properly. So many people have a different definition of this word that it’s nearly impossible to use; but people still throw it into the wind and use it for anything they can think of. Some people believe that it’s a sign of someone not caring, others use it for an excuse when they don’t complete a task, and others take it as a sign of betrayal. Believing is another thing that could be as simple as agreeing with someone, or it could be the difference between life and death. Elie Wiesel’s Night was a horrifying, sitting on the edge of your seat kind of book. It was almost like a form of torture; you never knew what was going to happen next, and you didn’t know how to prepare yourself

In Night, forgetting would be the equivalent to letting the Nazi’s win; no one would remember the pain, suffering and loss that went down during The Holocaust, and no one would remind those German soldiers of the things that they did and the amount of people that they hurt. They would have no remorse, and it would almost be like them getting a reward for starving and burning millions of people. Believing in this book was their first form of escape. They could have fled to a safer area, avoided all of this all together. But no one listened, and no one believed. When Moishe the Beadle, Elie’s mentor, returned from being sent away to Kolomay, he desperately tried to warn people of the incredible sights he witnessed. He even tried reaching out to Elie. Moishe “told [them] what had happened to him and his companions. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen” (Wiesel 6). Because Moishe was not the most popular man in town and barely had a sliver of respect from anyone in Sighet; the fact that people could not get over their views of Moishe, most of them ended up dying. If people had listened and believed them, they could have been saved a whole world of pain and suffering. Near the end of the book, Elie was looking backward and forward all at the same time saying, “if we forget, we are guilty,

But even if they didn’t, if they could have take a second or two to even consider the severity of the situation and realize that humanity can be that sick and twisted, they may start to believe that soldiers could have actually thrown “infants [who] were tossed into the air and used as target practice” (Wiesel 6) and small children and elderly people into a crematorium, all because they didn’t have the patience or the heart to either leave them home and let them die on their own, or even wait for them to be old enough to let them get a feel for the world.

Believing and forgetting have numerous different meanings and components to them that not a lot of people know, but they are two of the most important things a person could do to help themselves and others. Or, it could be the difference between life and death. Elie wanted to reiterate his overly traumatic upbringing to help keep this jarring memory alive. This book was about Moishe returning from Kolomay. This book was about Moishe going to see everyone in his community to warn them about the world and its inhabitants are capable of. This book is a warning and a reminder to always believe, and never