Loss Of Innocence In Night By Elie Wiesel

Holocaust can be defined as destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war. In Night, by Elie Wiesel, Elie went through many hardships while going through the holocaust. The book follows a young Jewish teen that gets put through the concentration camps of World War II. He loses his mom and sister, he loses his home, and he suffers from starvation and poor living conditions. Elie’s character changes many ways throughout the memoir with his loss of faith, innocence, and mistrust of humanity. In Night, Elie experiences a great loss of his innocence as a human. From the start, he has to lie about his age to stay alive. The author writes, “´Hey, kid, how old are you?´ The man interrogating me was an inmate. I could not see his face, but his voice was weary and warm. Fifteen.´ ´No. You're eighteen.´ ´But I'm not,´ I said. ´I'm fifteen.´ ´Fool. Listen to what I say” (Wiesel 30). An inmate from the camp was asking him this question to save him and

In Night, when Elie and the other prisoners were being transported to Auschwitz, young men beat and gagged a woman for screaming about fire and flames. Elie writes, “She is hallucinating because she is thirsty, poor woman…” (Wiesel 25). The cart ride was long and the prisoners were dehydrated and starving. The people in the cart thought the lady was crazy, screaming of death and fire. From the amount of trauma they went through, many prisoners were probably crazy. Another instance is, “She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal” (Wiesel 26). The men on the cart were so annoyed by these statements that they started to gag her and beat her to silence her. This shows how distressed everyone was from the events happening. This shows distrust in humanity because the people beating her did it for no reason. After seeing this happen, he loses his trust in