Symbols In Night By Elie Wiesel

Over 10 million people died in the Holocaust, and those that survived didn’t want to share their story. But when they do, we see the horror that unfolds, and just how bad it actually was. Elie Weisel wrote a book called Night, in which he discusses his experience in the labor and elimination camps of Nazi Germany. The title Night for a book is an interesting one to use, especially one about the Holocaust. Over the course of the book, Elie uses Night for different things, but mainly used as a metaphor for a never ending nightmare that the Holocaust was.

In Night, there is a lot of symbolism you can find early in the book, especially when he is talking about his trip to the camp. In the beginning chapters, Night symbolizes a time when things

No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.” Page 21. As he says this, he references an intense conflagration consuming them, and stars in the night sky as sparks fanning the flame. This most likely means that even though the night is dark, the darkness is better than the light of the ‘fire’ that was consuming them throughout. Throughout the text, the word night often also symbolized a time when he was studying, or when he was engaged in religious practices. As he said in the text, night was often a time when he would retire to study his religion, or night was a time he would cry over his studies. This could show that he is referencing night as the time that god is most present, and could

But, in his Nobel Prize Speech, he refers to the Holocaust as a Night. In the quote here, he voices Night as a hopelessness when he is talking about his days in the final train to the last camp. During this time, he says “The days resembled the nights, and the nights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness.” The message that we get from this is that in those final months, it seemed like an endless night, or endless feeling of hopelessness. Once again, he puts the hopelessness he feels into the word night, which is shown in the quote “Nobody had any strength left. And the night seemed endless.” In the quote he talks about the correlation between their loss of strength and the endless night (hopelessness) that seemed to be going on while in camps. Finally, he references the holocaust as ‘The Kingdom of Night’, which has many implications to it. The quote this is from is when he is talking about himself in the third person as he discovers the horrors of Nazi Germany, which he demonstrates in the words “A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night.”. That shows him as a young kid, reflecting on what the kingdom of night is, which shows him considering the Holocaust a worldwide darkness that enveloped him and the rest of Germany for the duration of