Identity In Night By Elie Wiesel

“Surely there is no more wretched sight than that of human body unloved and uncared for.”

(Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place). We all breath the same air, come into this world equal, and yet every single one of us is different. Our humanity is multi-layered, and revolves around the fact that we can think freely and make choices of our own. The rest resides in our identity. Elie Wiesel, along with millions of Jews had to struggle through one of the most emotionally and physically demanding crisis' in the history of the Earth. Many lost themselves and their identity along the way and were changed forever. Your identity is what makes you human. It separates us from all other lifeforms. By reducing a person’s identity to a generic number you

A person’s entire personality and life revolve around their identity, because your identity is composed of all your life experiences and how you handle new situations. Religion usually takes up a large portion of many people's identities and for many of them, being without the faith they would become empty and alone. Elie Wiesel is a great example of someone’s identity being changed in his memoir “Night”. Elie as a young boy was consumed by his faith in God and wanted nothing more than to learn Zohar, the secrets of Jewish mysticism. As he and his father travel through concentration camps, Elie starts to show bits of rebellion towards his beloved God. “Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves?... Because in his great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death?” (Wiesel 67) Elie himself is accusing God of causing all the pain and grief that he and the Jews have suffered. On the last day of the year, Rosh Hashanah, Elie shows his defiance by not atoning his sins because he believes that God should be the one asking for

First his family is split up, then his name is taken, and finally his faith in God was slipping away. Elie almost has nothing left to hold onto but his father, but like all the others even that bond was slowly breaking. “I had watched it all happening without moving. I kept silent. In fact, I thought of stealing away in order not to suffer the blows. What’s more, if I felt anger at that moment, it was not directed at the Kapo but at my father. Why couldn't he have avoided Idek’s wrath? That was what life in a concentration camp had made of me…” (Weisel pg. 54) Elie’s identity once was filled with dreams of faith and his father, now with his identity faltering Elie is on the edge of forgetting his past and losing the very things that make him human. Elie’s identity has changed in its entirety, but unlike many others, he still has one. Elie was able to even after having his life fall apart hold onto bits and pieces of his past self, but just enough to remember who he was