Symbolism In Night By Elie Wiesel

Symbolism can be seen through both good and bad alike. Though when it comes to instances that have to do with the holocaust, it’s almost always, if not always, a painful connotation. The holocaust is one of if not the the largest instance of mass genocide in recorded history. Leaving each Jew that survived with a different story to tell. While their story’s remained different, the pain that they each experienced was not. The novel“Night” by Elie Wiesel was a story about Elie’s individual experiences as he endured the horrors of the holocaust at its worst. On a deeper more intellectual level one can take his experiences of pain and suffering and dissect them down to find a deeper more intellectual meaning. The intense marching, severe cattle

But when one looks back at the times of the Holocaust, everything going on today seems to minuscule to even try to compare. One of the many horrible things that Wiesel had to deal with was the hardships of marching. Yeah one might look at the word marching and assume that maybe it wasn't that bad, but in reality it was horrible. When the term marching was stated in the book it was an understatement to what they were actually doing. What the march symbolized for jews was something so much worse. What they were doing could have been more accurately described as a run for their life. “They had orders to shoot anybody that could not sustain the pace” (Wiesel pg 85).They were given so little rest along the way and just simply not running at a fast enough pace meant that you would have your life taken from you. But to add on top of the horrors that were occuring was the climate in which all of this was happening in. “An icy wind was blowing violently. But we marched without faltering”(Wiesel pg 85). They were in the worst climate possible with a almost impossible standard to achieve. This same cycle went on for days. Run rest, run, rest, and than repeat. And with their only warmth being a thin blanket they did what we today would deem impossible during that time, they survived. When on looks deeper into the concept of marching one can see that what it truly symbolizes is the pain that the jews suffered