Yom Kippur In Night

Wiesel includes the term Yom Kippur in the book Night to show how desperate those in concentration camps were to ignore this very important holiday. Weisel shows the verbal irony in this passage by saying, “To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. (Weisel 69)” Yom Kippur is the most reflective religious holiday of the Jewish year in which fasting takes place to be cleansed of sins and bring reconciliation between individuals and God. The fact that Weisel along with a majority of the prisoners in the concentration camp chose not to fast shows the desperation and starvation they were experiencing. Deciding not to participate in an important religious holiday isn’t a decision one makes lightly yet so many of the prisoners were willing to give up this holiday for their small rations of food in an instant. For so many of them to have agreed to

When Weisel experiences, “Babies! Yes I did see this, with my own eyes, children thrown into the flames” (32). And the woman on the train shouts, “Look at the fire! Look at the flames! Flames everywhere” (26). These two quotes help to show the darkness and disparity during Wiesel 's time in the concentration camp. The flames in the burning of babies represent the death and loss of all those lives and he uses this idea of death in the symbol of fire and flames throughout the rest of the book. Flames everywhere is one of the first things Weisel sees when he arrived at Birkenau and those flames help to represent the burning of everything from individuals to everything they had known which shows how those flames and fire represent the loss of their old lives. Flames and fire are used many times throughout Night because they had such a big impact on the overall story and are used to illustrate much of the darkness during the