Pathos In Night

656 Words3 Pages

Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is an emotional memoir about his personal experience with the Holocaust, a mass genocide of European Jews, children included, during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and it's collaborators systematically slaughtered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out through mass shootings and gas chambers in labor and concentration camps. Throughout the story Elie Wiesel used imagery, pathos, and symbolism to convey human kind's capacity for cruelty. Wiesel's use of imagery is particularly powerful in conveying the brutality of the concentration camps and the atrocities committed against the Jewish prisoners, painting a picture of the unimaginable …show more content…

Wiesel;s personal experiences serve as a powerful example of the trauma that so many Jews faced during this dark period in history. For example, He writes about his fathers death: “I woke up to the sound of someone groaning beside me. ‘Father,’ I called out. ‘Father, wake up. They're taking you away.’” (101). This heart-wrenching scene highlights the emotional impact of the Holocaust on families and loved ones. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel struggles with his faith and belief in God, as he is forced to witness the atrocities that humans are capable of committing against one another. His candid and emotionally charged writing provides readers with a window into the psychological trauma that the survivors of the Holocaust endured. Lastly, Wiesel uses symbolism to depict the loss of humanity that occurred during the Holocaust. The concentration camps are a symbol of the destruction of humanity: “Beneath me, an abyss opened wide. I was inside the abyss, with it's smells, it's thirst, and it's hunger” (24). The concentration camps were places where human beings were stripped of their dignity, reduced to mere objects, and subjected to the most heinous acts of violence. The symbolism used by Wiesel serves to emphasize the magnitude of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and the importance of remembering these