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Night By Elie Wiesel Reflection

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Between the years of 1939 to 1945 six million Jews would die in the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel's family. Night written by Elie Wiesel, is a memoir written about Elie’s experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944 to 1945, during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jew and had lost faith in his religion when going through the Nazi German concentration camps. Elie Wiesel’s culture is similar to my culture as Elie is Jewish and I am Jewish. Elie Wiesel’s culture is Jewish and Elie’s culture is comparable to my culture

In the beginning of Night, Elie is a very religious Jewish boy who believes in God and is very observant. Judaism is an ancient monotheistic religion, with Torah as its …show more content…

In the concentration camps Jews would come in very religious but would lose faith in God because thousands of Jews would die in the crematoria. “And from within me, I heard a voice answer, ‘Where He is? This is where- hanging here from this gallows…”(Wiesel p.65). As this quote shows, Eliezer’s faith in God begins to falter at the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here the furnaces are busy night and day burning people. It is here where Elie watches German soldiers throw truckloads of children and babies into the flames. The longer Eliezer stays in the concentration camp the more he sees and experiences cruelty and suffering. Elie can no longer believe that a God who would permit such nightmare places to exist could be just. The fact that many Jews do continue to pray, to study Talmud, and to look for comfort in their faith while in the concentration camp amazes and confuses Eliezer. While in the concentration camp, Elie finds that people would still pray to a God that would allowed their families to be gassed and incinerated suggests to Eliezer that people are stronger and more forgiving than the God they pray to.Later, as more people die, and others around him lose hope, starve and succumb, Eliezer ceases to believe that God could exist at all. He is not alone in his disillusionment. Akiba Drumer is one person that Elie would meet while in Auschwitz.

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Elie, once so faithful, is one of the first to lose faith in God due to the horrific sights he sees. After witnessing the bodies of Jewish children being burned, Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). He quite understandably has begun to doubt that his God is with him following the sight of the supposedly chosen people’s bodies being unceremoniously burned. Elie, though, was perhaps not a member of the masses with this belief; in fact, some men were able to hold on to their beliefs despite these horrendous sights. Also near the middle of the book, Wiesel reflects on the faith of other Jews in the face of these events, saying that “some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come.

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Belief and Faith is a “double-edged sword” to the jews, it cuts both ways. It keeps them alive, and at the same time makes them oblivious, and leads to their suffering. Over time, Elie’s belief in god, diminishes and eventually he questions God’s existence extensively and at point, Elie is infuriated that even though they are being tormented and enslaved, the Jews will still pray to god, and thank him, “If god did exist, why would he let u go through all the pain and suffering (33). This is a major point in the ongoing theme of faith and belief, because for once he is infuriated with the thought of religion in a time of suffering. Throughout the book, with the nazis ultimate goal is to break the jews and make dehumanize them and if anything, their goal is take and diminish their belief.

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When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise… But look at these men whom You have betrayed, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!,” (pg.68) because of all the horrors and mistreatment Elie has endured, like witnessing infants being thrown into the trenches, “... Children thrown into the flames,” (pg.32), and watching his father being slapped, “... he slapped my father with such force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours,” (pg.39), his faith is distinguished. This contrasts to the beginning of the book where Eliezer says he cannot imagine a world without God, “Why do I pray?

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“I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son”(42). When Eliezer arrives at Auschwitz, the separation of his family puts an emotional toll on his father since he realizes that only him and Eliezer are still alive. This will be a catalyst to their relationship becoming stronger as they endure more together. Elie Wiesel, the author of the novel Night writes his own personal accounts of experiencing the Holocaust through the character Eliezer.

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Elie survives the Holocaust through a battle of conscience – first believing in God, then resisting his faith in God, and ultimately replacing his faith with obligation to his father. Elie begins his journey through the Holocaust as a firm believer of Judaism and of his God, using his faith as a motivation to carry on during his ordeal. The last of the Jews

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At the beginning of Night, Elie was someone who believed fervently in his religion. His experiences at Auschwitz and other camps, such as Birkenau and Buna have affected his faith immensely. Elie started to lose his faith when he and his father arrived at Birkenau. They saw the enormous flames rising from a ditch, with people being thrown in.

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and it changed him. In the book, Night, the main theme, is religion and belief which is shown when Elie talks about the his strong religion and belief as a boy, his disconnection from religion, and the inhumane actions the Nazi 's caused. Having such a strong belief in something and then dramatically changing how you think, is a very significant event. During this time, many people questioned where God truly was. Even Elie was questioning where God was.

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Elie Wiesel, author and victim of the Holocaust wrote the novel Night which portrays his experiences in the Holocaust. During the Holocaust the Nazis dehumanized many groups of people, but primarily the Jewish people. Elie writes about his personal journey through the Holocaust, and how he narrowly escaped death. In Elie’s novel he also provides detailed descriptions of what the victims of the Holocaust had to suffer through, and the different ways the Nazis made them feel like nothing more than animals that are meant to be used for work and slaughtered. One of the first things that Elie and the other Jewish people from his village have to suffer through is riding in a cramped cattle car, as if they were animals.

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Faithful Where there is death there is destruction, where there is smoke there is night. In Night by Elie Wiesel Eliezer is forced to endure beatings, selections that will determine if he will be alive the next day, separation from his family, and starvation. Eliezer is a young Jewish boy interested in learning kabala, but when he and his family are taken into Nazi captivity, they are forced to defile places of worship and desecrate their faith. It leaves them asking how this could happen to them? Throughout the story, Eliezer looks for someone or something to believe in because he starts to lose faith in God and he tries to use his dad as a remedy.

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Imagine believing so strongly in something and then being let down, or thinking that you were wrong even to believe. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie felt as though he had lost his religion and belief in God. We learned how strong his beliefs were when he says,“I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep of the destruction of the Temple,” (Wiesel, 14).

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The adversities at Auschwitz and Buchenwald caused Elie to lose faith in God.  Before being transported into Auschwitz, Elie was a boy who deeply believed in God and had absolute faith in God. Elie 's first seeds of doubt in God came when he was  transported into the camp and separated from his mother and sister. The other prisoners began reciting the Kaddish, but Elie got agitated when they gave thanks to God, “For the first time, I felt anger rising within me.

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After the hangings, the prisoners said a prayer. But Eliezer says, “Why, but why would I bless His name?... He created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death” (Wiesel 67). Eliezer, and soon, the rest of the Jewish prisoners, wonders why God would let this happen. People were starting to not believe in God.

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Inhumanity and Cruelty in Night Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, conducted a genocide known as the Holocaust during World War II that was intended to exterminate the Jewish population. The Holocaust was responsible for the death of about 6 million Jews. Night is a nonfiction novel written by Eliezer Wiesel about his experience during the Holocaust. Many events in the novel convey a theme of “man’s inhumanity to man”. The prisoners of the concentration camps are constantly tortured and neglected by the German officers who run the camps.

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