From 1932-45 roughly 6 million Jews perished, all people of deep faith, but what happened to their faith? How did their faith stand in the face of such tragedy? How did it fall? In Elie Wiesel's powerful book Night he shows the different ways that faith is strangled and ripped apart and repaired in a situation of incredible terror and violence like the Holocaust.
Everyone has different reactions to violence. Elie’s first reaction is to question is, “Why, but why would I bless [God]? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of Death?”(67). Elie witnesses horror on a level the world had not seen, let alone a 15 year old child. His first reaction to such a thing is to question how a “merciful” God can do such thing. When criticizing God he also blames it directly on him, he does not say
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When questioning God, after seeing a particularly awful hanging of a boy, he asks, “When You were displeased by Noah’s generation, You brought down the flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered , gassed, and burned, what did they do? They pray they before You! They praise Your name”(68). The first thing to notice is that he uses the word allowed here. Implying that he has reversed his first feelings that God was doing this, not allowing it to happen. Yet, the main thing to notice in this passage is that he begins to see what is happening as a punishment of the Jewish people. He compares it to God bring down the flood on Noah’s generation. He is asking, but what have these 6 million of Your followers done to warrant this torture? This is the next stage of how he views his God in the presence of