People always say that bad things happen at night. I believe Elie Wiesel called his Holocaust memoir, Night because Wiesel uses foreshadowing and symbolization of bad things with the name Night. Throughout the book, we see how Wiesel mentions the physical and symbolic darkness of night, right before something terrible happens. For example, in chapter 7 pgs 98-103, when Night symbolization as it relates to the author’s experiences. This happens when the car stops in a field and SS soldiers shout at the people in the cars to throw out their dead.
No one prayed so that the night would pass quickly.” This quote caught my attention for several reasons. One being it made me think about Elie’s change in faith ; Was this a references to how his faith in God and himself changed? Another reason this seemed that Elie was foreshadowing what was to come in the concentration camps. At the camps Elie and many others lost their faith in God and refused to pray to him.
What the Mr. Wiesel was trying to symbolize in this line is that his faith in God died while he was in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Another form of symbolism that isn’t directly in the passage is the word “night.” Night is used throughout the book to symbolize death, darkness of the soul, and loss of faith. Document B is an excerpt from the book “And Every Single One Was Someone” by Phil Chernofsky. The book is 1,250 pages of the word “Jew” written 4,800 times on each page.
For my creative response to Night by Elie Wiesel, I decided to make an alternative book cover. The theme that I chose to portray in my adaptation of the cover is the journey from darkness to light. My cover is black at the top and the amount of black reduces towards the bottom of the cover. I did this to show the transition from darkness to light that is shown during this novel.
Prisoners in Auschwitz received about three “meals” a day. Half a liter of “coffee” for breakfast, and a liter of soup for the noon meal. For dinner, the prisoners usually received about 10 ounces of black bread, with 25 grams of sausage or margarine, or a tablespoon of marmalade of cheese. The small amount of food prisoners got in concentration camps caused them to starve. In the story, Night, the absence of food caused Eliezer and others around him to slowly change themselves and their morales, hoping for a little extra soup or a crust of bread.
Elie Wiesel wrote a book about his days during the HOLOCAUST. The Book itself is an incarnation of the symbolic trauma he has experienced. Three pieces of evidence from the story will be explained on how Elie’s suffering was symbolic. Now the first piece of evidence will be explained. First we explain the symbolism of the crematory.
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.
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night"(Wiesel 34). Through Elie Wiesel’s witness of a genocide of his own people, the horrors that became his reality for a period of time was a never ending series of darkness. In his memoir Night, Wiesel uses night to symbolize a period of suffering and despair during his experience through the Holocaust. Night also symbolizes the darkness and hole left in Wiesel after this disaster has occured. Many survivors of the Holocaust are still terrified to tell their stories based on the fact that what they experienced still remains shocking to express.
At the end of the book Elie called himself a “corpse”. Why he said this because he went through a lot during the Holocaust, mentally, physically and emotionally. It all started when his family and him were placed in the ghetto. He was lucky enough to have his own house in the ghetto. He got to sleep in his own bed and live in his own house.
“I want to know how you keep holding on and believe again or how you never stop believing to begin with.” These words by Jessica Watson perfectly accentuate the battle that Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, struggles with throughout the novel. In the village of Sighet, Romania, a young Wiesel is enthralled by Jewish mysticism and believes the existence of an omnipotent God. One day, however, the Jewish people of Sighet are forced to live in supervised ghettos, and later brought to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Wiesel suffers with the physical torture of forced labor and hunger, as well as the mental and emotional torture of losing his family.
So does a rabbi from Poland, who used to pray all the time. He says to Eliezer at Buna, "It's the end. God is no longer with us." The theme of silence has several levels of meaning. The word itself, like "night," appears often in the book.
The Nazi's dehumanizes the Jews like animals by being psychologically deprived of their necessities. In the beginning of the story, the Hungarian police and later the SS soldiers force all the Jewish people into ghettos, Elie says: "There was no longer any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate" (Wiesel 21). The Hungarian police and the Nazi's take away the Jews individual rights as people and their safety as they are placed in a confined space they are seen as the same. Consequently, at the death camp, Auschwitz Elie was given a number along with other Jewish people to symbolically show them that they are inferior to the Germans: "I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other
He didn’t participate in the prayers and felt like an observer as he watched the men who gathered for prayer. " In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger."(68) As Elie and the Jews went through their days of working, starvation, and dehydration, they felt as if their days were night "and the nights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness." (100) The symbolism of night demonstrates the beginning of Earth
In “Night,” Wiesel utilizes the title to symbolize death, loss of faith, and darkness throughout the story. During the Holocaust, death was extremely common among the laborers. The smokestacks are used to smoke the laborers and burn them to death. The objective of the laborers is to survive until they reach the end of the journey. While marching, Wiesel’s friend Zalman is becoming extremely ill and is in the process of dying.
Death is the inevitable. Every little aspect of life comes in contact with death at least once in this cruel unbreakable cycle. Few are taken by death as early as before the exit the womb. Before they are ever able to live a life that will eventually come to a bittersweet end. Others are lucky enough to live past their due.
