Summary Of Night By Eliezer Wiesel

Humans endure psychological struggles within themselves daily. However, no one has experienced them the way Holocaust survivor, Eliezer Wiesel has. He is the author of Night, a novel explaining his experience in German concentration camps during World War II. Elie was a young Jewish boy who wanted to grow in his faith and was very family oriented. As the Nazis begin their massacre, he must adapt to this foreign environment he was thrown into. Not only does he struggle physically but also emotionally and mentally. He begins to question all his past beliefs and develops apathy toward his surroundings. This will cause him to have many internal conflicts which distract him from the main goal ,survival, because no conflict is worse than the opposing

While Elie witnesses the horror of his fellow Jews being exterminated by the Nazis, he begins to question the existence of God. He is seen gradually straying from his faith as he asks, “ What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do you compare to this stricken mass gathered t o affirm to You their faith , their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe , in the face of all this cowardice , this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people's wounded minds, their ailing bodies?...Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children t o burn in his mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night , including Sabbath and the Holy Days ? Because in his great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau , Buna , and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him : Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night , to watch a s our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on thine altar?....I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God , without man . Without love or mercy . I was nothing but

When Shlomo asks the Gypsy guard, who is watching over the prisoners, to use the restroom, his question is answered with a brutal slap across the face. Witnessing this, Elie begins to gather his thoughts and says to himself, “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal's flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me. All I could think was: I shall never forgive them for this” (Wiesel 39). As Shlomo gets slapped right in front of Elie, he becomes aware of how much he has changed. He is appalled at his lack of sympathy toward his own father yet, aware of how the Nazis have dehumanized him in such a short amount of time. He now sees Shlomo as a liability rather than a loved one he should defend. This internal struggle will intensify the longer Elie is in the concentration camps. Elie becomes increasingly aware of how incapable and useless his father is. He wastes so much energy on his determination to keep Shlomo alive because they have already endured so much. When the prisoners arrive to a competent location where they can rest semi comfortably, they quickly fall into a slumber. The next morning, Elie says “When i woke up , it was daylight . That is