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Hitler’s Nazi Party commited many horrible atrocities that affected millions, killing six million Jews and five million Gentiles. Celebrated Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, writes about his experiences at Auschwitz in the memoir, Night. Wiesel underwent beating, whipping, forced labor, and starvation and witnessed many other inhumane acts at the hands of the Nazis, all while he was between the ages thirteen and seventeen. The many traumatic events that Elie experienced during his time in a concentration camp altered both his physical appearance and his spiritual relationship with God.
The book Night by Elie Wiesel shows how suffering and witnessing the painful deaths of many innocent lives can be the cause of loss of faith in the benevolent god. This book is taken in a horrible, inhumane place called the Holocaust. It all started when Moshe the Beadle stopped talking about God after he had witnesses the massacre of Jews by the German Gestapo; at that time no one believed him but time would prove them wrong. When Elie witnesses the horror of the concentration camps and what they do to people especially children he feels as if his God has been murdered right before his eyes. In the camp he sees an atrocity after atrocity, death after death.
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.
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.
In the memoir “Night” Elie Wiesel writes about what he experienced in the holocaust. He went from his house to ghettos and then to concentration camps and the entire time he had to wear the star of david. Elie was in the concentration camps and went through many events from the time he was forced to go to the ghettos until the last people including him were let free. Elie’s views on God changed his identity after he lost his trust in God and caring towards others. Throughout the memoir Elie along with his father and the other Jews changed due to how they were treated.
There comes a time when everyone questions their faith due to a tragedy or visual tragedy they experienced. Elie Wiesel saw the effects of holocaust and experienced it Elie faith was very strong in religious matters he prayed and hoped that his god did this for a purpose and could forgive him but when he saw the effects were to harmful for just not everyone but himself. For examples the part of the book night in chapter 2 the burning baby’s/ baby’s being thrown into the pit of fire, the never ending work process, and the killings although his faith was strong it was almost vacant to him due to the effects he experienced. At the beginning of the war Eliezer was dedicated and absolute in his belief of God, but throughout the events of World War II his faith slowly starts to wither away.
In the Old Testament Book of Job tries to answer the question, why is there evil, when God exists? Job endures intolerable misery by Satan, Job eventually does not curse God and is in the course of time, awarded twice of the blessings he had in the beginning of these trials. However, the main question is still left answered: why did God grant Job to suffer if he did nothing wrong? In Night, Elie Wiesel lost his faith throughout the trials of the concentration camp, Auschwitz. Wiesel and the Jewish community was and still are perplexed on what could have they done for millions of families were separated, children murdered, and thousands of souls lost.
In his autobiography novel, “Night”, author Elie Wiesel writes about the horrors of his past, and towards the end he saw himself as a corpse when he looked upon the mirror which reflects his current state; he no longer believed in God’s goodness nor His justice. Elie Wiesel was a Jewish boy who had strong faith in God, but over the course of his life when he went through catastrophic events such as losing his mother, father, younger sister, starving, and being in concentration camps he declined God’s justice and blamed him for everything that was happening to him. In 1944 Elie and his family were deported to Auschwitz, a concentration camp, and that was where the horrors began. In the first instance, when Elie and his family arrived at the
At the beginning of Night, Elie was someone who believed fervently in his religion. His experiences at Auschwitz and other camps, such as Birkenau and Buna have affected his faith immensely. Elie started to lose his faith when he and his father arrived at Birkenau. They saw the enormous flames rising from a ditch, with people being thrown in.
Elie is losing faith in God because he has been able to create Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Buna, which kills many. He says, “But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament,” (68) demonstrating Elie’s full move-away from God. Elie’s identity is left insecure and he is now alone. Elie was not “terrible alone in a world without God, without men.”
Elie Wiesel uses many factors to display the horrors that took place at Auschwitz, but his use of Judaism and faith are by far the most prevalent and, in my opinion, the most meaningful. His transition from an ultra-orthodox Jew to an Atheist in such a short time period showcases the amount of trauma and dehumanization caused in order to put in motion such an upheaval. Elie Wiesel begins his memoir by describing himself as, “deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.” (3) With this statement, he is trying to articulate that at this point in time, Eliezer’s life was mainly comprised of his faith.
Religion is something that many people have consistently believed in and turned to in times of need and support. Some of these people rely on their faith more than their own family and friends. Their religion is their entire life and they can’t imagine their lives without it. Imagine a scenario that’s so terrible that God won’t take you out of it. These people will wonder where God is and pray for Him to come.
As a naive child with an unwavering faith in God, the barbaric acts executed by the SS officers in Auschwitz, traumatizes Elie, initiating the gradual destruction of his beliefs and moral confidence in God. Elie and his father undergo their first of many selections, saving them from death for now, but does not liberate them from witnessing the terrible acts occurring. Elie would never “forget that night... those flames that consumed my faith forever...even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself,” (Wiesel 34). As a child devout to studying God, the harrowing experience of the first night in the concentration camp, leads Elie to question Him as he watches the wrongful deaths of so many individuals.
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.
In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when he questioned God, ¨Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled, he caused thousands of children to burn his Mass graves?¨(Wiesel 68). Overall, Wiesel does not follow the words of God and is not believing in him anymore because he thinks God is the one thatś letting all the inhumanity occur. One theme in Night is that inhumanity can cause disbelief or incredulity.
