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Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

970 Words4 Pages

Sandra Lin
Mr. Hairston
10th-grade Advanced English
5 March 2023
Night Essay
In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, he analyzes the consequences of the Holocaust: prisoners are stripped of their identities and reduced to mere numbers and objects to be exploited by Nazi officials. This raises the question of how Wiesel’s experiences during the Holocaust affected his perception of himself. As the plot progresses, Elie attains a new understanding of his religious values, how an individual’s morality diminishes during anguished times, and how the presence of hope differentiates life from death. These new values influenced his character, where he developed from a young naive boy with a promising future to a prisoner whose physical appearance and health …show more content…

The sad-eyed angle was condemned to death after remaining silent during the investigation. The little pipel’s hanging served as a pivotal turning point in his religious development. During the sad-eyed angel scene, Wiesel proclaimed that God was “hanging here from this gallows…” indicating a deprivation in his religious beliefs because it was a representation of the Nazis killing God (Page 65). In the beginning, Wiesel described himself as a devout Jewish boy—when Moishe inquired why Elie prayed, he responded with “Why did I live? Why did I breathe, ” indicating that his religion was so ingrained within his life that he compared it to living and breathing (Page 4). However, this ideology started to dissipate …show more content…

The father-son relationship is heavily depicted within the memoir. Wiesel and his father were fortunate to have each other during the Holocaust, when other prisoners had lost everything. At the beginning of the book, Wiesel and his father were described as having a close and love relationship. Throughout their time in the concentration camps, the father and son relied on each other for mental and physical support to endure unspeakable cruelties. However, their relationship is strained, as Wiesel’s father becomes a burden and is unable to care for himself. Wiesel often recalled moments where he felt disinclined to give his meager portion of food, but later felt guilty about his thoughts. One famous saying from the playwright Bertolt Brecht correlates to the situation between Wiesel and his father, “Grub first, then ethics.” An individual’s necessities must be met before they can be ethical to others. As the camp conditions and health started to deteriorate, it was increasingly difficult for Elie to continue caring for his father. However, their bond remained strong and served as a symbol of hope and resilience in the face of imaginable suffering. It is also a testimony of how love and the human spirit can prevail, even during the darkest

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Jay Patel Mrs.Eisenbeis English 2BH Period 1 February 2016 Night Essay The Holocaust was a tough and terrible time for the Jewish people, they struggled to survive, and the ones that did are telling their story today. The book “Night” is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel. The book is about the main character Elie Wiesel, and how Eliezer’s family are from a small town, put in a concentration camp after being separated. Elie goes with his father and they both have to survive the harshness of Auschwitz.

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In his memoir, Elie Wiesel writes, “Since my father's death, nothing mattered to me anymore” (113), showing that his reason for living had left him. He also states that he had “only one desire: to eat. [He] no longer thought of [his] father…” (113), which allows the reader to comprehend that with no reason to live, instinct had taken over. Somehow, he indifferently fought to survive, but it was very clear that his beliefs on life had changed

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After being separated from his mother and sisters Wiesel’s only sense of home was his father which led to a growth in their bond. Once his father discovered that he might be going to the gas chambers he wanted to give Wiesel everything he had to help him “My inheritance… “Don't talk like that, Father.” I was on the verge of breaking into sobs. “I don’t want you to say such things. Keep the spoon and knife.

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To begin, human connections can shape lives by taking away one’s sense of hope. The excerpt Night by Elie Wiesel begins with Eli telling the reader his emotions after experiencing the holocaust. Elie says, “Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky” (Wiesel 37). In this quote Elie has a flashback to when he lived in the concentration camp and experienced the brutal murder of children and adults. This experience changed him forever and took away his hope for humanity, since he experienced such inhuman actions.

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Imagine if you found yourself in such an awful situation that everyone around you is slowly beginning to die, or being murdered right in front of you. You know there is nothing you can do about it, and if you try to do anything about it, it can threaten your own life. This is the exact situation that the author of the book Night, Elie Wiesel, was in. He lived through the Holocaust and made it out free and alive after such awful experiences he was put through. Wiesel defines and explains exactly what it feels like and how important it is to connect with those around us during tough times.

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When they reach the camp they are sepperated men on one side then woman on the other. This is the last time he sees his mother and sister. After that his plan throughout the camp is to stick with his father no matter what. As they are walking a man comes up to him and asks him his age. When he says 15 the man tells him “No you are 18” and then asks Eli’s father how only he is.

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“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” (Wiesel XV). In the novel Night written by Elie Wiesel, this quote shows how the world should not forget about the Holocaust and that we should recognize the reality of genocide of the past and the present to stop it from happening it again in the future. I think Elie Wiesel quote is the reason why we should remember the Holocaust because if we do not recognize what the Holocaust is about or pass our knowledge or understanding to our future generations, it has the potential to be repeated. There are three reasons why I believe it is important to remember the Holocaust and why our future generations should never forget it as well. The first reason is remembering the Holocaust

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Wiesel addresses not only his own situation, but also the effect survival had inwards other fathers and sons in the camp. The memoir

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“It always starts with the Jews but never ends with the Jews.” Antisemitic has been around throughout the middle ages and now in the 20th century where it can now be documented as its hatred is on the rise. Often, Jewish are the targets of extremist parties and their behavior and ideologies have been most of the time acceptable. Most people start with a criticism of the Israel people. That is where the line starts with the mindsets demonizing a group of people, making them look like the common enemy and that becomes antisemitism.

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Reading "Night" by Elie Wiesel drastically influenced my view on life. The horrendous depictions of life during the holocaust era described by Elie was traumatizing. Reading each line in the book gave me goosebumps. Imaging that a time era in which jews were oppressed to that of a gruesome extent is beyond conceivable. The book allowed me to reassess my life.

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Throughout the memoir, Wiesel talks about how disgusted he is with how the conditions he and the rest of the prisoners are in have destroyed family bonds and have made everyone selfish and destroyed any compassion they’ve had for each other. He believes that the family bond should be strong and constant, like the bond he has with his father. He continuously explains how he felt like his father depended on him, and that it was his own responsibility to care for his father as much as he could by staying alive as long as possible. On page 86 while talking about how his father was the only reason he wouldn’t let himself die, he says, “ I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me?

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He was left with his father—whom he never really had had a intimate relationship with. His father, although distant at the beginning of his life, became part of Wiesel’s sole hope and purpose for living. Throughout the book we see many transitions. Transitions from camp to camp, changes in Wiesel and his father’s relationship, and a definite transformation in Wiesel’s faith.

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Throughout Wiesel’s childhood, his father never played a large role in his life and was described as a “rather unsentimental man” (Wiesel 2). The relationship between Elie Wiesel and his father, before they know the horror that awaits them, is very dull and in no way meaningful. Wiesel’s father does not only have a distant relationship with Weisel, but also with the rest of the family, which Wiesel realizes when he notes, “He [Wiesel’s father] was more concerned with others than with his own family”(2). In a way, Wiesel’s father even acts somewhat selfish when he does not allow young Wiesel to study the cabbala, which

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To find a man who has not experienced suffering is impossible; to have man without hardship is equally unfeasible. Such trials are a part of life and assert that one is alive by shaping one’s character. In the autobiographical memoir Night by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, this molding is depicted through Elie’s transformation concerning his identity, faith, and perspective. As a young boy, Elie and his fellow neighbors of Sighet, Romania were sent to Auschwitz, a macabre concentration camp with the sole motive of torturing and killing Jews like himself. There, Elie experiences unimaginable suffering, and upon liberation a year later, leaves as a transformed person.

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At times, it appears unviable for one’s life to transform overnight in just a few hours. However, this is something various individuals experienced in soul and flesh as they were impinged by those atrocious memoirs of the Holocaust. In addition, the symbolism portrayed throughout the novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, presents an effective fathoming of the feelings and thoughts of what it’s like to undergo such an unethical circumstance. For instance, nighttime plays a symbolic figure throughout the progression of the story as its used to symbolize death, darkness of the soul,

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