Night Elie Wiesel Character Analysis

The Holocaust is known as the largest and most vicious genocide known to human history. Not only was it a racial onslaught on Jews it also caused a total of 60 million causalities. 6 million of them were Jews. Elie Wiesel, one of the few holocaust survivors, awakens the truth behind the Nazi death camps with his memoir, Night. In his story, Wiesel accounts all of the camp horrors into the young boy Eliezer. The atrocities of the camps turn Eliezer from a faithful and innocent young boy to a witness of the death of his innocence, faith, and family.
Moshe the Beadle is the first character to be introduced in the book. Even though Moshe disappears after the first few pages into the book, his ideas resonate throughout the entire story. First

This is the time when Eliezer was really close to losing his faith in his God. During the first hanging of the Warsaw Youth, the prisoners showed no pity. They thought it was a fair punishment and honored the youth in a robotic and emotionless way. On the other hand when the pipel is hanged for suspected sabotage the crowd blows up in misery. They were all remorseful and questioning how God is still quiet after seeing this barbaric act. In one of the book’s most famous passages, Elie states that “Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” Elie finds it disturbing about the idea of God’s silence. He wonders how the all-powerful god can allow such horror and cruelty when the people devote their entire lives worshipping. This is when he notices that God is actually dead. The existence of knowing that God had the lack of divine responsibility shakes Eliezer into almost losing his faith with the hangings. Eliezer in that period did not question about God he actually found the answers to

The first encounter is in Buna, where Eliezer’s foot is painfully swollen. During his stay in the camps, Eliezer only thought was survival. In his stay in Buna though, his goal to stay alive was further strengthened, causing him to only think about food and nothing else. When he was injued, Eliezer panicked. He was clueless about what to do until a doctor told him he needed surgery. After being sent to the hospital, Eliezer was keen on staying alive. He keeps on asking the doctor if he was going to stay alive after the surgery. The reassurance from the doctor calmed Eliezer but Eliezer still was looking out for his only survival. The second encounter was in Buchenwald. In his thoughts he stated, “One day I was able to get up after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.” His mindset shows that through all the hardships that Eliezer has gone thorough, all the pain and sorrows that he needed to face, he has finally given up. Traversing through the entire story, Eliezer still had that small spark of faith inside of him. He still believed in his god despite of all the circumstances. Eliezer still believed that somehow God will still stay and help him despite how small his faith was diminished to. At the end of the story, Eliezer has lost