How Is Night By Elie Wiesel Alike

Trinity Brown

Ms. Scauso

English 10

4/14/2023

Childhood Trauma

The book “Night” is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel who known to of survived one of history’s greatest atrocities, the holocaust. In “Night” we follow the journey of a Jewish teenage boy named Elie Wiesel who is taken to a concentration camp toward the end of the second world war. In the autobiography “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi, we follow the story of a young Iranian girl named Marji. In “Persepolis”, Marji has to face adversity during a time of war and sorrow after the islamic revolution. Elie Wiesel and Marjane Satrapi are two extremely different but extraordinary authors. Though they both lived through extreme conditions and atrocities, they had very different personalities

At the beginning of Persepolis Marji is struggling to balance her religious and societal morals, due to how she was raised (Persepolis, page 10: online). While Marji eventually figures out her morals, Elie experiences the opposite. Elie Wiesel was an extremely religious boy with consistent morals before he entered the concentration camps during the holocaust. After he got out of the concentration camps he was so bent down and broken after losing most of his family, that he eventually stopped believing in God and lost his morals. Elie shows this in Night when he says, “In the beginning, there was faith—which is childish; trust—which is vain; and illusion—which is dangerous. We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekhinah's flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and in his soul a reflection of God's image. That was the source if not the cause of all our ordeals.” (Night, pages

Both of them were in strict and stressful environments, which negatively affected their personality. In addition, they were positively influenced by other factors. For example, when Marji got older she started listening to Kim Wilde (Persepolis, page 138 online). This influences Marji positively by feeding her rebellious spirit and helps change how she views the world. While Marji had Kim Wilde to influence her, Elie had more of a mentor. Moishe the Beadle was a Rabbi where Elie lived, and he was someone that Elie looked up to when he was young. Moishe helped fuel Elie’s faith in God and therefore influenced him to be religious. Due to these external influences affecting them positively and negatively it developed their personalities and set them down their life