What Is The Theme Of Hope In Night By Elie Wiesel

Food, water, and shelter are often the bare necessities to survive, but there is another factor often overlooked: hope. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, he details the atrocities he faced while living inside the Auschwitz concentration camp accompanied by his father, and how he survived with the concept of hope. The same principle is in the article “Hope: A Paradox” by Robert Kishaba, who explains how faith in one’s life can help or desert a person. The work “A Legacy of Hope from a Family of Holocaust Survivors” by Idit Klein has the same ideology but focuses on how family allows for happiness. These works conclude that without hope, whether through family or if it is a fallacy, the chances of survival would be close to none without it,

For example, Elie and the people in Sighet continued to deny the incoming dangers, favoring the deception of safety. First, when Moshe the Beadle came back with his stories filled with brutal murders, instead of trusting Moshe, they blindly assumed any good news coming in. As more information came in about how the Germans were losing, “[t]he Jews of Sighet, were waiting for better days, which would not be long in coming now.”(Wiesel 5). Wiesel exhibits how they did not want to believe in Moshe’s truth, but instead tries to believe in distant stories rather than the horrors in front of them. Even if he was sincere in his trauma, everyone lived in ignorant hope so they can move on with their lives in Sighet. Some of the people in the concentration camp also tried to make themselves feel better, by giving themselves assurance through lies. The camp they were in was be evacuated and a patient next to Elie remarked “‘[m]aybe the Russians will come first”’ which Elie believes they “knew perfectly well that they would not” (Wiesel 77). Even though liberation was practically impossible, they held out false dependence to give them a purpose to survive. He knew freedom would not come so he ran, instead of trying to reach dead

Like Elie and his father, many others had experiences where they continued on for their family. For instance, in “A Legacy of Hope from a Family of Holocaust Survivors”, the author’s grandmother experienced the Holocaust accompanied by her sister Flora, and her cousin Katy. Here they would recite plays and novels to keep their spirits alive. Flora and Katy did not survive, but her grandmother “always spoke of how she owed her life to them because they kept her hope alive” (Klein). Klein’s grandmother continued to go on with the assurance that her family members contributed, which ultimately led to her survival. Even after their deaths, she still recognizes what they have done for her. In “Hope: A Paradox,” where Kishaba explains how the Christmas to New Year’s period of 1944-1945. During this time, the death rate in the concentration camps dropped a considerable amount because all the prisoners thought they would be home by Christmas, but when they realized they would not go home, the “prisoners found no reason to continue holding on” as “[w]hen a mind lets go, so does its body” (Kishaba). Emphasized in this story is the connection between the mind and body, as the brain is what functions a person. When the mind refuses to go on without internal faith, the body will also die along with