Night Elie Wiesel Analysis

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Elie Wiesel’s Use of Imagery in “Night”

“Never shall I forget those first few moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes”("Night Quotes."). During Elie Wiesel’s period of being in the Nazi’s hands, he could remember every detail of the disgusting few years. He used his memory and experiences from the concentration camps to create imagery. Through Elie Wiesel’s use of imagery in “Night”, he created desperate, scared, and disgusted tones.

Elie was born in 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania. He was raised in a village in Romania and Elie’s world revolved around family, his studies, community, and God ("The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.") Shlomo, his father who died in a concentration camp in 1945, created …show more content…

The people at the concentration camps were constantly scared for years and years, being imprisoned and fighting to keep their life. “We all threw blankets over our shoulders, like prayer shawls” (1256). This is saying how the prisoners were so cold that they had the only piece of cloth over them that they had and they were like prayer shawls. Prayer shawls are a symbol of peace and they are comforting from God. Now they were holding the blankets over them just to keep the little warmth they had left. The prisoners were helpless and scared for their lives because they didn’t know if they would die from hypothermia, or be shot by the Nazis. “We could hear new gunshots again, very close. But we had neither the strength nor the courage to believe that the Nazis would not have time to evacuate us, and that the Russians would soon be there” (1256). The prisoners would hear gunshots from war and they wanted to escape and run into the battle and get rescued by the Russians but they were terrified that the Nazis would shoot them down. The uses of imagery explain why the prisoners were scared and how that tone is used throughout the …show more content…

“Night” has very dark tones and Elie used his experiences to create the imagery. He had a childhood filled with studies and good memories and when the Nazis took him, that all changed. Elie Wiesel is now a changed man because of the Holocaust and he used his past experiences to create the imagery in “Night”.

Works Cited

"Introduction to the Holocaust." Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum, Washington, DC, 29 Jan. 2016. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.

"The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity." The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. N.p., n.d.

Web. 05 Apr. 2016.

"The Holocaust: An Introductory History." Jewish Virtual Library. Ed. Jason Levine. American-Israeli

Cooperative Enterprise, n.d.