In chapter seven of Night, by Elie Wiesel, one of the most emotional scenes is shared. The Jews are being transported to a different location and the officers begin to throw bread crumbs as a sort of sick, twisted game. They enjoy watching the Jews turn on each other and maim one another just for the smallest crumb of bread. In my cartoon, the first quadrant is the scene where young Eliezer talks about the train ride and how claustrophobic everyone became due to the space provided and the amount of Jews crammed in. The next frame is of the father crawling out of the mob while our main character sat watching.
In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, there was a very strong shift in the tone just within the first three chapters. “The shopkeepers were doing good business, the students lived among their books, and the children played in the streets”(Weisel 6). It is shown here that they were living ordinary, peaceful lives. “The shadows around me roused themselves as if from a deep sleep and left silently in every direction”(Weisel 14). This is where people began to no longer feel peaceful and began the long journey of fear and worry that would get worse throughout the book.
Every story written has a tone that is put into the story by the author. Tone is the attitude of the author toward the subject, or the audience. In the book “Night,” tone is something that is present all throughout the story, especially so in chapter five. Here are some of the most prevalent ones that are in this story. One of the biggest tones in this chapter was the feeling of fear.
Chapter One Summary: In chapter one of Night by Elie Wiesel, the some of the characters of the story are introduced and the conflict begins. The main character is the author because this is an autobiographical novel. Eliezer was a Jew during Hitler’s reign in which Jews were persecuted. The book starts out with the author describing his faith.
Elie Wiesel’s “Night” depicts death, obliteration, and anguish while directly depicting the suffering he witnessed during his time at Auschwitz, a concentration camp for Jews during World War II. Within the story, there is an overwhelming amount of times the Jews had been in distress. Many children had been separated from their parents and all of the Jews were taken from their homes. Their suffering seemed endless. They were no longer teachers, homeowners, or priests.
The author of the Night did not understand why God punishes the innocent and righteous, who worship Him, even in the death camp, what did they do? They pray for you! Glorify your name. Wiesel openly expressed his hatred for God, was not afraid. He thought that after what happened in Auschwitz, the religious dimension of Jewish identity completely lost its meaning.
In 1944, in Sighet, Romania, Elie Wiesel studies the Talmud. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, warns that Nazis will soon come for them, but Elie's family stays calm. Later, they begin shipping Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Elie's family is a part of the load. One of the jews, Madame Schächter, begins having visions of flames, then ironically at midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group sees flames rising and smells burning flesh.
At what point does respect no longer matter? When does the need for survival take over grief? When do the tears dry up in order to stay alive?
The first choice Elie endured was on his journey from Buna to Buchenwald when he was offered a sparse amount of food in the train cars. Interpreting how drastic the living situation was, Elie states, “We received no food. We lived on snow; it took the place of bread. The days resembled the nights, and the nights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness,” (Wiesel 100). Consequently, the prisoners had no other option but to consume the snow because they were so malnourished.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a piercing account of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps Wiesel endured as a young adolescent. During his captivity, Elie is plummeted to the depths of suffering, and driven to the edge of his own humanity. Before being placed in concentration camps, the Jews of Sighet, Transylvania were confined to ghettos. Although the Wiesel family did not have to move because their house resided within the ghetto’s territory, many other Jewish families were forced to relocate. The Jews of Sighet desperately tried to return life to “normal”.
The setting of Night is during world war 2. Written in by an Eliezer Wiesel when was a teenager during the holocaust in Hungary. He was an orthodox Jewish (the follow all rules and laws of the Jewish religion.) The Germans take over Hungary.
Before the effects of World War II reached the town of Sighet, Hungary, Eliezer, the narrator and main character of the novel, lived a peaceful life studying the Torah and Cabbala with the Moshe the Beadle despite his father’s desires. After Moshe is deported and returns to Sighet, he tries to warn the town of the horrors perpetuated by the Nazis and tries to prevent them from torturing and killing the Jews in Sighet. Soon, the Nazi arrive to their town, but they don’t initially show their intentions to commit genocide of all Jews; because of this, everyone remains oblivious to the impending horrors. They are slowly ripped of their humanity as they are forced to give up values, forced to live in Jewish ghettos, and then forced to concentration
For Wiesel, the war seemed a distant event, and at his young age he did not bother to think much about what was happening in the feared concentration camps. Until he was deported with his family to one of them. In fact, many families in the area did not believe that the war was actually occurring, or at least not in the way they counted. Elie Wiesel describes the scenes he sees with an agony and a pain that make it impossible for the reader not to feel the same. One of the strongest scenes is when he witnesses one of his "companions" being forced to throw his own father in the oven.
Like steel to extreme heat and intense pressure, people often reform when placed under harsh conditions. This has the potential for proxy effects on moral considerations. This moral reformation is often more of a moral degradation as people revert back to their selfish survival instinct. This is evident in Elie Wiesel’s recollection of his experience as a Jew in the Holocaust. Nazi Germany’s transportation of the Jews into concentration camps was executed with a lack of consideration for comfortability.
The Holocaust was one of the darkest page in mankinds history. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, gay, and disabled were persecuted for their belief, sexual preference or their natural body. They were sent to concentration camps filled with brutal treatments, starvation and were operated with surgeons who were performing unethical operations. “Night” by Elie Wiesel is a short novel made by the merging of several short stories. The short stories are about him, his father, and other prisoners living in the dark days of concentration camp.
