Nina Luo Mr. Deck Literature of Holocaust October 29th, 2014 Night Elie Wiesel’s memoirs, “Night”, illustrates a horrible experience of a young Jewish boy who not only lost his faith in God, but also lost his entire family during the Holocaust. At the beginning of Night, Wiesel foreshadows the terrible manners of the SS men by narrating his teacher, Moishe the Beadle, who guided him in his studies of the Kabbalah. Moishe had been the one who unconditionally believed in God; however, he was totally changed after escaping from the camp and no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. Nevertheless, since the people still believed that they would be saved under the protection of God, they were all too late to buy emigration certificates to Palestine. …show more content…
The relationship between Wiesel and his father became one of the major themes of the narrative, which reflected the dehumanization process of the prisoners in the camp. At the beginning of the transport, Wiesel and his father were separated from his mother by one command “Men to the left! Women to the right!”, bonded by a common destiny. However, after suffering the treatment in the camp, their self-respect and their humanity was savagely destroyed during the last couple of days. Wiesel’s father, who was too old to work hard, was beaten with an iron bar, and almost “break in two old tree struck by lighting.” As Wiesel wrote previously, when his father was struck in front of him, he still had the emotion of guilt and helplessness so that he “would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh”, even thought he “stood petrified”. Ironically, for this time, …show more content…
During the first hanging, people did not feel pity for the man who died, yet they complained that the ceremony wasted them so much time. I believed that, not only the person who complained about the ceremony, all the people in the camp, including Wiesel, had the same kind of emotion without pity and sorrow. All the prisoners in the camp, in order to survive, cared only about what and when they eat and became more and more heartless and selfish. For those people, this hanging ceremony was only a chance to get extra bread and soup. “I remembered that on that evening, the soup tasted better ever…” Wiesel wrote about the taste of soup at that night reflects his reaction to the execution. At that time, Wiesel still felt that the hope of surviving and liberty exists from the words of the adult dead on the stage that said: “Long live liberty! My curse on Germany! My cure! My…” However, the second hanging touched those people’s hearts. The main character of the second hanging is the little boy who was “too light” to be hanged to death. The little boy moved them a little bit by implanting the idea that no one can survive in the end because no one, like the little boy, will speak out a word about liberty anymore. The prisoners might accepted the hanging of the adult was an unspoken threat to keep other people obeying the Nazis; however, they could not kept silent when they witnessed the death of the little child who continued breathing