Compare and Contrast Auden’s and Faulks’ Use of Detail Establish a Feeling of Alienation in ‘Refugee Blues’ and ‘the Last Night’

Night by Elie Wiesel remains a shocking and terrifying memoir of a survivor of the Holocaust, the murders of six million Jews and five million Gentiles. Elie, a victim of this dreadful event, was forced to separate from his family, and to miss the life he once had. Elie transformed into a unrecognizable, scarred person by the end of his journey. Elie’s traumatizing experiences in the concentration camps of Auschwitz affected him significantly; he changed both spiritually and in his relationship with his father.

When dealing with Non-Fiction and Memoir it is imperative to realize that no two authors will approach telling their story in the same manner. Elie Weisel and Charlotte Delbo, two survivors of Auschwitz, both chose to write their Memoir as testimonials of their experiences. Despite sharing a method of testimonial and similar experiences in their stories, the two finished pieces are nearly entirely different. This paper will focus on Elie Weisel’s method of reporting his experiences to the reader, as opposed to a brief discussion on Delbo who tends to reflect. The scene of focus in the comparison and contrast will be the arrival scene as the authors enter into Auschwitz. This is a universal scene that would have been similar for everyone that entered into the camp, so it is what I call a unique shared experience, as everyone’s experiences will of course vary. But, aside from being a common experience it is also a common primary reflective moment that both authors spend quite a bit of time discussing.

The Holocaust, or a jewish sacrificial offering that is burned on an alter, largely refers to the massacre and slaughter of over 6 million european jews from 1933 to 1945. One of the largest genocides took place less than 100 years ago. A recently fresh event on the historical timeline, and yet there would be little known on exactly went on inside the camps without the testimonies of survivors. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, produced the book “Night” as a way to cope with his time in the labor camps and to shed light on the reality of the inhumanity that engulfed numerous concentration camps across europe. After ten years of silence, the book was written by Wiesel to express his personal experiences inside the labor camps, as well as his testimony to horrifying and inhumane actions inflicted upon his beloved family and bunk mates. In “Night”, Elie Wiesel explores the evils in humanity by sharing his personal experiences and personal witness of inhumanity, and shares his own moral values of man.

In Night by Elie Wiesel, the author reflects on his own experience of being separated from his family and eventually his own religion. This separation was not by any means voluntary, they were forced apart during the Holocaust. Wiesel was a Jew when the invasion of Hungary occurred and the Germans ripped members of his religion away from their home in Sighet. A once peaceful community where Wiesel learned to love the Kabbalah was now home to only dust and lost memories. Most members of that Jewish community were never to return, hell greeted them with open arms as they walked through the now rusty gates of Auschwitz. In order to survive unimaginable circumstances that were enforced in these camps, a boy had to hang on to his humanity. But by no means did humanity stay with the boy, being subjected to the horror of concentration camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel saw first-hand how members of other communities attempt to silence opposing voices. All of the pain that Wiesel saw inspired him to keep watch and tell stories for people who wouldn’t live on to tell them for their own families. Stories are what keeps a person alive and through Eliezer’s words that he puts down many are able to get a sense of closure in knowing what occurred at these camps. One story occurred on the first train ride away from home, a lady named Madame Schächter was beaten up for crying out against imminent death, unseen by others.

Scared, facing the door of death every day, make one bad move and it’s all over and your only reason to stay alive is because of the idea of being free. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he uses Irony, imagery and foreshadowing to illustrate the Holocaust. The author shows how hard it was to be a normal teenager, to be captured by the nazis, and then having to work in the concentration camp. This novel shows how many loving families got split up in the concentration camp to never see each other again and how terrible the Holocaust was.

An author’s form of word usage and manipulation provides stories their feeling, tone, and pace while simultaneously creating a reader’s suspension of belief. Elie Wiesel in his book Night tells us of the year he spent in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Like many people have said and proven true, a lot of things can happen in a year making it almost impossible to retell every experience down to a tee; with this information in mind Wiesel writes of the moments that stuck with him, and would possibly with readers.

The terrors of the Holocaust are unimaginably destructive as described in the book Night by Elie Wiesel. The story of his experience about the Holocaust is one nightmare of a story to hear, about a trek from one’s hometown to an unknown camp of suffering is a journey of pain that none shall forget. Hope and optimism vanished while denial and disbelief changed focus during Wiesel’s journey through Europe. A passionate relationship gradually formed between the father and the son as the story continued. The book Night genuinely demonstrates how the Holocaust can alter one's spirits and relations.

In the American memoir, Night, Nobel Peace Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel constructs a story about the horrific events he endured during the Holocaust. In the pages of this memoir, he portrays the life of Eliezer, a child born Jewish. In the later chapters of the book, Eliezer endures the tragic hanging of a pipel who lost his life for not giving up the names of the inmates that worked to sabotage the power plant at Buna, a forced labor camp in Germany. The guards forced Eliezer and his father to walk past the child as he hung from the gallows stuck between life and death. The death of the child signifies the death of Eliezer’s faith. The author used this position in the memoir to signify the end of the main character’s religious views, which makes this the climax of the book. The climax fits into the structure of the memoir at this point by staying consistent in word choice and advancing the plot further. The use of the appeals and tone also ties this scene into the plot. However, each translation utilizes these devices differently. The scholar’s translation focuses on ethos, logos, and a helpless tone. Marion’s translation uses pathos and a bitter tone. Marion’s version more effectively uses the appeals and tone because it conveys more emotion to the reader.

As the famous journalist Iris Chang once said, “As the Nobel Laureate warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” After experiencing the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust, Eliezer Wiesel narrated “Night”. Eliezer wrote “Night” in an attempt to prevent something similar to the Holocaust from happening again, by showing the audience what the consequences are that come from becoming a bystander. Elie illustrated numerous themes by narrating the state of turmoil he was in during the Holocaust. In Night, Eliezer provided insight into what he experienced in order to teach the unaware audience about three themes; identity, silence, and faith.

In the novel “Night”, author, Elie Wiesel uses imagery to share his experiences as a jew during the holocaust. Wiesel’s use of imagery helps demonstrate the tone and purpose of the entire novel. Elie Wiesel’s journey starts off  subtle but in the end leaves the reader heartbroken.    Throughout the story, Wiesel describes his tragic memories during the nazi concentration camps, which establishes a dark and somber tone. His descriptions and use of imagery creates the tone and purpose of “Night”.

At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.

The chaos and destruction that the Nazi’s are causing are not changing the lives of only Jews, but also the lives of citizens in other countries. Between Night by Elie Wiesel and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, comradeship, faith, strength, and people of visions are crucial to the survival of principle characters. Ironically, in both stories there is a foreseen future, that both seemed to be ignored.

The Holocaust was a time of great suffering and inhumanity. The novel Night, which took place during this time, was written by Elie Wiesel and talks about his teen self-experiencing the concentration camps of Auschwitz. This is related to the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas which is the story of a young German boy named Bruno who befriends a Jewish boy in a concentration camp. The many similarities and differences between the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the novel Night include their many themes of “inhumanity” and “guilt and inaction”, and the two also share and differ in the loss of innocence of the characters and how they develop in each medium.

As evidenced in both Night and Transit, human beings have a remarkable ability to survive horrifying and inhumane experiences through hope and optimism. The author, Elie Wiesel, is a survivor from the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel was held in concentration camps and dehumanized on a daily basis. The most heartwarming part about the survivors of the Holocaust was their ability to retain hope in such dark times. Hope and optimism were a fantastic resolution that arguably kept a will to survive for the prisoners. Transit by Anna Sigher’s is an escape story, a run from the Nazis that portrays the tension of waiting, hiding, and scheming in order to safely flee and survive the Holocaust. Trying to survive became more of a game to Seghers as she hurried from one consulate to the next in an attempt to assemble the visas and permits required for journey. The details portrayed in both stories for the refugees whether they were enduring concentration camps or escaping what they endured showed the true strength of a survivor.

In 1939 September WW2 began with Germany invading Poland, then later the declarations of war on Germany by United Kingdom and France. The war brought terrors to Germany as Jews were out casted and treated inferior like animals! The Refugee Blue is a poem written by W.H. Auden, as it denotes the conditions experienced by a Jewish Couple as they rights were very inadequate. During the time when Hitler was in command he formed his racial Rampage, it was almost certain most people will be seeking for refuge; when the war begun most countries became hesitated to allow in refugees. As well as this a novel written by Charlotte Gray called ‘The Last Night’ which also resembles WW2 but it indicates a different repulsive catastrophe of the war;