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Tell A True War Story 'And Elie Wiesel's Night'

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Pain is a necessary evil of war; remembrance of the pain is purely perception. Throughout Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” and Elie Wiesel’s Night there are many references to intense events of tragedy and redemption with vivid and eye-opening detail. These sources of work take us through war via two completely different vantage points through two completely different wars. Wiesel’s Night take us on the tragic endeavor of a person of Jewish belief during the Holocaust. On the contrary, O’Brien’s “How to tell a True War Story” takes us on the thrilling journey of US soldier during the Vietnam War. The definition of “war” in both of the texts is contrasted in terms of context, but in terms of the authors’ remembrance, perceptively they are similar. As …show more content…

O’Brien states this with “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty” (O’Brien 66). Wiesel would agree with “This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent” (Wiesel 118) and “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” (Wiesel xv). Wiesel is referring to the uncomfortable truths of “war” and the story of how a cultured people could turn to genocide, and how the rest of the world, which is also composed of cultured people, remained silent without action. Wiesel and O’Brien are in mutual agreement, war should be relayed through story telling without modification to culturally accepted norms or truncation of detail. To do so would not only be an injustice to the reality of the story, but an injustice to the people who lived the reality of “war”

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Nothing is sugar-coated. Everything is real. Elie Wiesel writes to inform. He informs the readers of what really happened and how it changes a person and he succeeds. Elie’s descriptive words of the gruesome events capture the moment and make the audience feel as if they too are a victim.

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During the Holocaust, the meaning of the word “war” varied drastically from person to person. For some people, it was just another article in the newspaper. But to others, it meant being shipped off to a labor camp or never seeing their loved ones ever again. The book Night describes the life of Elie Wiesel and his experiences during the Holocaust and how the word “war” changes throughout his life.

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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.

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In his Nobel prize speech in 1986 Elie Wiesel stated that” to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time”. In his memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel, he shares his experiences of the Holocaust through the eyes of a young teenager. Ellie and his father, Shlomo, must quickly adapt from a peaceful life to living a nightmare in the concentration camps. The memoir highlights the horrific war crimes the Nazis committed, and the suffering Jewish people went through. The best authors are often the ones who can make the reader attach to a text.

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Holocaust survivor and author of the novel, Night, Elie Wiesel in his speech, “The Perils of Indifference,” claims that indifference is not only a sin, but is an act of dehumanization. He begins to develop his claim by defining the word indifference, then enlightens the audience about his personal experiences living through the war, and finally asks the audience how they will change as they enter a new millennium. Wiesel’s purpose throughout his speech is to convince his audience not to be indifferent to those who were and are being treated cruelly and unjustly. He creates tones of guardedness , disappointment, abandonment, and hopefulness in order for his audience to see his perspective during the horrific times of the war.

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Wiesel informs how remembering the Holocaust is the key to preventing mass genocides like it in the future. This central idea is shared among other peoples accounts like “Night” by Ellie Wiesel, Arrival at Auschwitz testimonies, and President Biden's Holocaust Remembrance Speech. The memoir

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In the memoir Night (1956), Elie Wiesel narrates that the inhumanity and cruelty the prisoners endured from the Germans inspire both savagery and nobility of spirit within them. Wiesel develops his claim by describing his personal experiences and the conditions in the concentration camp and by illustrating the emotions of the fellow prisoners around him. He provides his readers with these examples in order to make sure that the reader knows the hardships that the prisoners went through during the Holocaust and to justify the reactions of the many prisoners that he was surrounded by. Wiesel addresses this memoir to anyone in the future generations to certify the fact that the events of the Holocaust will never be forgotten. Wiesel develops this

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Silenced Night came quickly as we headed on our way home walking through a dark, silent street. The chilly weather outside made the nights here unbearable. It was so cold I felt like an icicle( hyperbole). This was the usual weather in London.

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In his speech, he states: “if we forget them, they will be killed a second time. And this time, it will be our responsibility.” (Wiesel 118). This signifies Wiesel's understanding of the weight his book carries. This book projects all the terror, fear and helplessness of this time.

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Finally, the author expresses the dangers in ignorance and forgetfulness, “Because if we forget who the guilty are, we are accomplices” (Wiesel). He also conveys how if we forget the guilty, we do not care about what crimes they put forth. We cannot be ignorant to the oppressors, for the effect is the same as to side with them. In conclusion, Elie Wiesel persuades the audience and expresses his bias on neutrality during World War II by using his authority and personal

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“Ambush” by Tim O’Brien and “In Another Country” by Ernest Hemingway both develop the theme that war causes lasting changes in people’s lives that they must work to overcome long after the fighting has ceased. However, the authors approach the theme by focusing on different traumas people may need to overcome in the wake of a war. Hemingway portrays this through a group of soldiers’ efforts to recover their pre-war selves after being injured in War World I. The soldiers visit “the hospital every afternoon” even though “none of [them] believed in the machines” because it gave them hope that they could recover. Whereas in “Ambush,” O’Brien conveys this theme through the narrator’s struggle to forgive himself for killing a young man during the

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Wiesel appeals to the emotions of the audience throughout his speech in order to further persuade the audience. Wiesel asks if he has “the right to represent the multitudes who have perished” and the “right to accept the great honor on their behalf” (Wiesel 2). He says he did not and that “no one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions” (2). Wiesel engages in the emotions of his audience, trying to make them feel sorrow for the hundreds of thousands of Jews that died in the Holocaust. He also says that no one person could ever

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When the young boy asks, “Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent”, (paragraph 5) again the audience is prompted to emotionally respond. They have to realize that it was all of them, all of us, who remained silent and that this silence must never happen again. Wiesel demonstrates a strong use of pathos throughout his speech to encourage his audience to commit to never sitting silently by while any human beings are being treated

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Very few books illustrate the suffering endured in World War II concentration camps as vividly as Elie Wiesel's Night. It is a memoire that will leave disturbing mental images of famine, anti-Semitism, and death such as infants being shoveled as

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Wiesel’s speech shows how he worked to keep the memory of those people alive because he knows that people will continue to be guilty, to be accomplices if they forget. Furthermore, Wiesel knows that keeping the memory of those poor, innocent will avoid the repetition of the atrocity done in the future. The stories and experiences of Wiesel allowed for people to see the true horrors of what occurs when people who keep silence become “accomplices” of those who inflict pain towards humans. To conclude, Wiesel chose to use parallelism in his speech to emphasize the fault people had for keeping silence and allowing the torture of innocent

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