Loss Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

Of the 9 million people who died during the Holocaust, 6 million were Jewish. Elie Wiesel, a Jew from Transylvania, Romania, is a survivor of the Holocaust. His family was initially forced into a ghetto but were soon transported to Auschwitz, the deadliest concentration camp. Elie was split up from his mother and sister and was only left with his dad. Elie Wiesel’s The novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, portrays a first hand account of a Jew as it follows the journey of Elie during the Holocaust. A literary critic describes Elie’s life: “Growing up in a small village in Romania, his world revolved around family, religious study, community, and God. Yet his family, community, and his innocent faith were destroyed upon the deportation of his

The officers at the camp force the prisoners to watch the hangings of people and to look at them after. They do this in order to insinuate fear and show the punishment of being disobedient. Elie describes his thoughts and the words of other prisoners. “I heard the same man asking: For God’s sake, where is god? And from within me, I heard a voice answer: Where He is? There is where-hanging here from this gallows”(65). This illuminates his loss in faith as he directly says the destruction of God and his faith occurs as God hangs from the gallows. He uses this metaphor of God being hung rather than the child being hung in order to demonstrate how his faith has been completely destroyed. This aligns with the similar ideas of the other prisoners as they also question where God is and why he is not helping them. The Nazis force the prisoners and jews to watch this and it is something that emotionally traumatizes them as it is a sight they can never forget. In another instance, Elie describes another way sights consume and kill his faith. Robert Brown uses this event to illustrate an additional way Elie says his faith is destroyed. ”Even in the passage just cited, it is not God, but Wiesel's "faith" that is consumed by the flames. What has been "murdered" is "my God and my soul," the God conceived of by the pious Hasidic child of fourteen years"(72). Brown demonstrates how as he witnesses the flames and smoke of the dead, his faith has been killed. All prisoners believe this is their inevitable future and having that thought makes them question their faith once