Response For Dawn By Elie Wiesel

Response Paper: Dawn In the novel Dawn, by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel writes about a fictional charter who he named Elisha. After the war Elisha got recruited to start living the life of a terrorist but he is not your typical cold hearted born to kill kind of terrorist what sets him apart is his conches. When Elisha is ordered to execute a man he has a difficult time wrapping his head around it. For only being eighteen years old Elisha had witnessed a lot of death and after he became a terrorist he had caused a lot of death too. It never came easy for him to take on the roll of playing God but he did it because it was his “job”. He always tried to keep his emotions out of it even if at times it did take him back to his days in the concentration camps. Elisha responds to this when he says, “I found myself utterly hateful. I remembered the dreaded SS guards in the Polish ghettos. Day after day, night after night, they slaughtered the Jews in just the same way” (165). In making this comment, Elisha argues that he is no different then those SS officer who would kill and torture innocent Jews. He disliked those SS

Dawson was the victim of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The only reason he was on death row could be blamed on the law of retaliation or “an eye for an eye” and the one chosen to in force that law was Elisha. Elisha fought with the burden the entire book. He wanted to hate John Dawson he figured that would simplify everything. According to him, “ Hate would have made everything so simple…Why did you kill John Dawson? I killed him because I hated him” (Elisha, 216). Basically, Elisha is saying that if he could hate Dawson then that would give him reason to kill him because he knew without hate he was killing him in vain and all thought he could not find any reason to hate Dawson, Elisha still killed him and along with the death of Dawson a part of Elisha died