Trauma In Night By Elie Wiesel

Trauma’s Effect on Identity
Life experiences such as trauma shape and reshape people into their individual identities. Things such as faith, mannerisms, and general world views are all affected by a unique human experience on earth. This development of an individual is unveiled in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. Through this novel, he details his experience in a concentration camp during WWII and thoroughly showcases how such agonizing life events affected him, which he usually describes through metaphorical light and dark and his development/loss of faith through this part of his life. In later speeches Eliezer makes, he explains his opinions on indifference in our world as worse than evil and some basic research of trauma responses in humans

Before he was ever sent to the camps, he was asked why he prayed to which he thought it was a “strange question,” (Wiesel 4) it was as if asking “Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (4) as he explains. Though later experiencing such terrors in the camps, he often compares them to hell on earth. Through the novel he switches from blaming his god to humanity for such horrors, he early on claims that he will never “forget those moments that murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” (34) Understandably so, through the entire novel Wiesel goes on continuing to add emphasis to his loss of trust in a deity’s presence throughout the novel, a notable moment being when he was brought with many others to gather and watch a hanging of a young child. As witnesses of the event pondered the presence of their god, Wiesel believes he is “hanging… from these gallows” (65) where the child was hanged. After Eliezer had gotten out of the camps, in future speeches he would often mention his religion, he had regained a strong part of his identity. During the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech he delivered in 1986, he even recited a Jewish prayer which translates to, “Blessed be Thou… for giving us life, for sustaining us, for enabling us, and for allowing us to reach this day.” (117) clearly displaying his regain of faith,

He learned shortly after escaping the camps that not only had the rest of the world known of these camps, but also that for a long time they did nothing to help. In this instance, indifference of the world was the most dangerous of all evils because “indifference elicits no response” and therefore “is always the friend of the enemy” (Wiesel 3) according to Eliezer’s speech Perils of Indifference. One’s struggles often affect how they see others, and in experiencing such terrors due to indifference it makes perfect sense to want to advocate for others experiencing hardships. Often, these worldviews are directly related to instinctive reactions to traumatic