Night By Elie Wiesel Research Paper

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In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, a common theme throughout the book is loss of identity. In this memoir, Elie Wiesel goes into detail about his experiences during the Holocaust and what it was like in Auschwitz. The book truly captures how the Nazi goal was to dehumanize Jews and by doing this the Jews lost their sense of self and identity. In the end, Wiesel doesn’t even recognize himself anymore. By taking away all of their belongings, their religion, and even their name, the Jews did not know who they were anymore and couldn’t recognize themselves. There are many ways the Nazis attempted to dehumanize Jews. One way is to remove their name. In the part where they are getting sorted into blocks, Elie talks about his name getting taken away. "The three ‘veteran’ prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I have a A-7713. From then on, I had no other name." 51). The. A person's name is one of the most important things to a person. It is the one thing you would assume …show more content…

Throughout the book, Elie begins to question God and his relationship, “Where is God?” (65). To Jewish people, their religion is one of the most sacred things to them and for him to question God just shows how much suffering they went through. When Elie was talking about things he would never forget, he said, “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever”. (32) This is saying that his faith will never fully be restored because he cannot get over what happened to him during the Holocaust. He felt very guilty about questioning God, but because he lost his identity and his faith is a big part of his identity, he really couldn’t help it. Elie’s loss of identity is important in this book because it shows how the Nazis didn’t view the Jews as humans and even the Jews began to not see themselves as human. It's important to learn and read about this to truly understand what the Jews went