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What Is The Purpose Of The Book Night By Elie Wiesel

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Daniel Haugen Mr. Dayton Ninth Lit/Comp 19 October 2014 Starvation in Concentration Camps Eliezer Wiesel’s Night is a memoir about his own personal tragic experience with the Holocaust Concentration Camps. While there Eliezer’s entire life turns upside down as he is exposed to the worst forms of torture that anyone should be involved with. Night greatly demonstrates the evils that were bestowed upon the Jewish community and the other groups thought by Hitler to be intolerable. The Concentration Camps caused the Jewish people to be deprived of the proper nutrition leaving them not only physically scarred, but psychologically as well. One of the most known facts about the camps is that the prisoners were not treated fairly; truly they were dealt …show more content…

Only a four word sentence and still it has more meaning than almost all the rest of the sentences. The prisoners knew how important food really was since they were forced to live without very much of it. Eliezer states: “Bread, soup – these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time,” (52). Just take some time to think about that. They had become literal skeletons of their past selves stuck in a horrid world. Eliezer explains the food situation as the bread being the crust of the real thing and the soup being almost just hot water with some taste to it. The starvation caused physical scarring to the body. Also there was psychological scarring to the spirit within their body. Their thoughts only consisting of: when the next “meal” would be …show more content…

In only around a year Eliezer had already lost everything: his whole family, all possessions, his humanity, and his faith in God. Eliezer writes after release “Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That’s all we cared about. No though of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread,” (115). No revenge, only bread. They were starved to that point. He even added: “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me,” (115). The memory will haunt him for however long he will live. That’s something he will just have to live

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