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.
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.
During all of the struggles Elie gains a bit of life knowledge, and learns more emotions about himself. If this journey never happened Elie would still be focussing about his studies and not about his family. A fact Elie acquires during the holocaust is always to stay positive in hard times. An example of this is when Elie is running for miles and notices men giving up just makes Elie think about when he can sleep and eat at the next camp. When news comes that the Russians will save the prisoners, Elie keeps this as a positive and keeps thinking this horrifying journey will be over.
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.
Elie Wiesel lived through a rough concentration camp that involved different parts where innocent human beings died. His reference to “...they listen, they cry, they warn” explains how those who died are still around with them through the Holocaust and help them be warned about the events that happened. Elie shares that the Jews suffered in inexplicable ways by how they were told that they were taking a shower but instead were taken into a chamber where Zyklon B was exposed, disease exposure in locks, and they even had to create certain things for the Nazis’. Jewish families were separated into different camps but few had survived in the Auschwitz camp, where Elie went to. Although these horrors were hard, Wiesel learned to stay calm and heard
When he returned from the meeting, he told everyone that all the Jews are going to be deported to an unknown destination, and that they will only be allowed one bag per person. If someone told me this news, I would be torn and lose all hope. I would be devastated if I had to leave the house I grew up in and go to a place no one knew about. Surprisingly, Elie’s family and other Jews did not take it that way. The Jews did not believe anything bad could happen to them, they did not despair, and they quietly passed up on opportunities to escape.
Elie Wiesel’s novel Night is required reading in just about every sophomore English class in the country. The novel, along with a lifetime of humanitarian work, earned Wiesel the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Night is one of the most powerful depictions we have of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust; a work carefully crafted to achieve Wiesel’s ultimate purpose: to bear witness to the atrocities and allow the reader to feel the suffering of the Jews and of millions of others so that in identifying with these characters, the truth seeps into the bone marrow of the reader and fires a determination to do whatever is necessary that atrocities like this never happen again. Wiesel opens the novel with a character sketch of Moshe the Beadle.
In the beginning of Elie’s experience, he gets the choice to abandon the ghetto and go with the family’s former maid to a safe shelter. He chose to stay because Elie would have been separated from his parents and little sister. This choice had a negative impact, but also a positive one. The negative side is that Elie’s family stayed in the ghettos, and then the concentration camps. At the time, no one could believe the rumors about the Nazis.
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.
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” The Nazis were a political party that liked to control the Jewish people, and they didn’t like the Jews because the Aryans thought they were better than everybody else. They liked to split up the Jews from their families and send them to camps. As the Holocaust unfolded, the Nazis used strategies such as separation and mistreatment to isolate, oppress, and control the Jewish population. Separation and Isolation The first strategy that the Nazis used was separation and isolation.
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.
Wiesel's obligations were letting us know basically what needs to happen or the actually meaning. His obligations were basically hope, despair and memory . Hope, Wiesels was saying that dreams are not dream without hope and that hope is really important and that hope with ou memory is like memory without hope, " For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope. Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future"(page 1 para.3).
Families should always be important to you no matter what. Elie and his father are in a very rough spot because they are in concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. They are going through times trying to survive in the camp so they would have to stick together. “Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp.
