'And' For An Auschwitz Survivor, His Son's Graduation Spelled Freedom

As with all human beings, there are happy memories and bad memories. Some have no effect, and others can change someone’s life completely. Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, Night, writes about Elie’s external conflict of the horrors of the Holocaust’s violent concentration camps. Elie resolves this conflict by having all the hope of the world in him and enduring the evident deaths of his family members; however, Elie’s trek also illustrates his character as both enduring and dependent. Elie’s decision to staying hopeful and stay enduring also reveals the universal theme of, “The toughest and darkest of times and experience can test your hope”

In class we previously read the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. This book told the story of young Elis’s life as he suffered through the holocaust. As we all know the holocaust was a very dark period, where millions upon millions lost their lives. Prisoners from all over were taken and jailed in concentration camps where they were tortured endless with no boundaries. Along the way to liberation many lost hope and gave up completely. Certain traumatizing events affected the prisoner's hope along with the inner and outer forces.

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Night by Elie Wiesel are two tragic stories about the experience of these Holocaust survivors during the horrors of the second world war. In the 1940’s it was a very difficult time for Jews who were victimized by the German Nazis and sent to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where conditions were worse than imaginable. Elie first entered a concentration camp when he was 12, along with his father, mother, and three sisters. Levi, an Italian jew, was 24 when he was sent to the camps for participating in a resistance group, but unlike Wiesel, did not have his family by his side. Levi, despite his bitter character, acquires hope from the humanity and compassion of others while Wiesel, even with his strong relationship with his father, can't maintain his desire to hope for survival or alliances.

Lost hope, brutal disciplinary actions, and mistrust among starving men, Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, Night, sets in 1944-45 in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. An optimistic, 15 year old German, perseveres the harsh living conditions as a Jewish boy and is forced to abide commands of SS officers in concentration camps. Witnessing Chlomo Wiesel nearing death first hand made Elie realize “... there was no more reason to live.”(93). His father, his only blood, was a symbol of motivation to continue Elie’s desire to live. Without Chlomo, Elie would have approached death sooner. He could not abhor the thought of his father bereft of life, as he “slapped him as hard as I could”(94) till he was conscious. Elie grasps to the hope of being

Being a prisoner of war can change a person, dramastically. World war two, one of the most devastating wars; over fifty million people died, and yet this number is just a roundabout. One main factor, called the Holocaust, the extermination of six million Jews, gays, and anything German’s deemed unfit. Based on a true story, we venture through the mind of a young Jewish boy named Elie. Elie one day was taken from his home, and sent to a German concentration camp known as Auschwitz. Elie is soon to realize that this place is no joking matter. Through the process of selection, the disassemblement from his loved ones, and the deportation of saved ones to specialized camps, Elie questions his faith in God, himself, and his welfare of family members.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, Jews were stripped of their identities and put into death camps by the Nazi soldiers. This is what happened to Elie Wiesel when he was only 15 years old. Elie and his family were captured and put into an extremely large death camp called Auschwitz. As soon as he and his family stepped through the gates, his mother and sister were murdered and Elie and his father were put to work. This memoir, Night, is a description of how Elie stayed alive in the camp and how he lost belief in his religion. When put into a horrible situation, it’s easy to lose faith.

Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor who wrote a firsthand account of his experiences – Night. He was from Sighet. Although, given the opportunity to flee to Palestine, most of the Jews who were in Sighet did not believe that the Nazis would be able to get to them before World War II would come to an end (Wiesel 8). Wiesel and his family – his mother, his father and three sisters – were evacuated from their home in 1944 – near the end of World War II. Night by Elie Wiesel demonstrates that tragedy does not disappear from a person’s memory; instead, it shapes that person to be more empathetic, aware of the importance of hope and the need for a purpose in life.

During the holocaust, six million men, women and children were murdered by the nazi regime, a notoriously cruel enemy to the Jewish people. However, the ultimate conflict for Jews was not with the racist political party but instead with themselves and their personal thoughts and feelings. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the reader is introduced to Elie’s younger self and follows him through the horrors of the holocaust. Though it is easy to assume that the greatest struggle for Elie was to physically survive Auschwitz, it was instead the inner struggle to remain human against Nazi dehumanization. After the Nazis caused Elie to lose the necessary human components of faith, health, dignity and relationship, he found it very difficult to be

The Holocaust appeared to be a time of darkness and it seemed like on Earth and in heaven, each doorway of humanity, empathy, and kindness had been closed down. Those who did not encounter the Holocaust cannot begin to comprehend what it was like, however, those who did cannot begin to express it. Torture, genocide, and cruel acts started to fill brains and souls. The Holocaust was an event where millions of people were being murdered during World War II. The memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel is based on Wiesel’s experiences in concentration camps, in order to give readers an insight of someone who was a victim of the Holocaust. The young narrator, Elie Wiesel, faces countless struggles for survival among the horrors of the Holocaust. In the memoir, Eliezer, the passionately, devoted boy with a benevolent family, is taken from his home and sent to a concentration camp. Through their unstable and dangerous journey, Elie is detached from his mother and sisters but lingers on with his father, only to be relocated from camp to camp. Elie mentions the death of numerous family members, the death of his own identity and innocence, to an extent in which living or dying did not matter anymore. In Night, Wiesel reveals that the exposure to an unsympathetic, bitter world generates to the destruction of the three main themes throughout the memoir which are; religious faith, identity, and family.

A purpose in life is what individuals strive towards everyday, whether that be through faith in religion, humanity or something else. Back in the 1940s during the devastating Holocaust, where Jews were sent to their deaths, many questioned where their faith lied or if they had any at all. In this Holocaust memoir “Night”, Elie Wiesel’s growing relationship with his father balances his increasing disbelief in the God he once trusted, revealing the powerful human need for purpose.

Holocaust narratives are often stories of maintaining hope throughout inhuman treatment, but there is more to it than that. In the case of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, first published in English in 1960, hope is denial. Hope is, prior to Elie and his family being sent to Auschwitz, the denial that extermination is imminent. Hope is the denial that what they have heard about the Nazis is true, allowing them to complacently live in a ghetto and then be shipped off by train to a concentration camp. However, after they have arrived hope takes on a new form. Hope is no longer an act of self-destruction, but instead an act of self-preservation. For Elie, to hope in a concentration camp is to deny the very real possibility that his father, Shlomo, will not survive until the end of the war, and for Shlomo hope is the denial that his son will die. For each of them, the hope required to continue living is not the hope that they themselves will survive the war, but instead the hope that the other one will. In Elie’s memoir, hope is both a pathway towards death and survival.

When events take a turn for the worse, some of what would seem to be detrimental actually become beneficial. During World War II, the Nazi Party believed that the Non-Aryan citizens of Europe were the cause of the recent downfall that was occurring in the continent. Specifically, Hitler and his forces targeted Jews mercilessly. Elie Wiesel, at the time just a young boy from Sighet , was incarcerated for merely existing as a Jew. Ten years after liberation, he documents the reality of his time in the camps. Wiesel’s loss of faith results in the strengthening of his relationship with his father.

During the ghettoization process of the Holocaust, the constant mistreatment received from authoritarian figures wore down the spirit of the Jews. After having their citizenship revoked as a result of the Nuremberg laws, the Jews were susceptible to physical, emotional, and psychological harassment and abuse. In Elie Wiesel’s case, a majority of the pain inflicted on him and his community was conducted by the Hungarian police. By being segregated into ghettos -- and at the end of constant abuse -- the Jew’s spirits were defeated and they had their hope whittled down to nothingness. In his book, “Night”, towards the end of living in the ghetto, Wiesel details how “weariness had settled into our veins, our limbs, our brains, like molten lead” (Wiesel 16).

Experiences encompassed in times of struggle can lead to a new transformative perspective of one’s relationship with self and the world. William Shakespeare’s last play “The Tempest” (1610), canvasses loss catalysing rediscovering the importance of life resulting in a greater understanding of how our flaws compromise our humanity. Prospero, the usurped Duke of Milan, shows this to be true, moving from a mindset focused on vengeance to a profound discovery of self. Similarly, in “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946), fulfillment with discovering how we choose to cope and find meaning/purpose in life through unrelenting struggle is illustrated. The three-part non-fiction told by psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, depicts his ordeal inside of concentration camps during the Second World War, elaborating on finding true meaning in life even under the most horrific circumstances. Frankl shares his process of discovery demonstrating his ability to overcome the most overwhelming experience leading to doorway of meaning, purpose and happiness.