Connections through Experiences

When Elie and his camp were liberated he maintains his faith but it is extremely weak. Elie still wonders if God cares and feels like the Germans murdered his faith. “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: For God’s, where is God? And from within me, I heard a voice answer: Where he is? This is where— hanging here from the gallows” (65). Elie is experiencing the hanging of a child and Elie feels the Germans killed his faith just like the young child.

During World War II, the Jewish race was one of the most persecuted of all the minorities harassed by Hitler and the Third Reich, and a day to day basis, Jews across Europe lived in constant fear, wondering if today would be their last. Especially in cities close to the expanding Nazi empire, there was no telling when their last breath would come. In the memoir, the closely knitted town of Sighet is controlled by the Germans, leaving anyone of Jewish descent to obey their commands in total fear of their personal safety. Elie Wiesel describes this genuine fear when he wakes up a close friend of his father, “‘Get up sir, get up!...You're going to be expelled from here tomorrow with your whole family, and all the rest of the Jews…’ Still half asleep he stared at me with terror-stricken eyes.”

Fire can also be seen as a symbol of Elie’s loss of his faith in his God and in the Jewish religion. In Judaism, tradition says that the evil and wicked will be condemned to Gehenna and suffer a fiery punishment. However, Elie’s experiences reverse what he was taught by his faith. The innocent were murdered in the crematorium by the evil. This shows how Elie’s faith was strongly questioned during the Holocaust due to the experiences and how his concept of religion was changed dramatically. “Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.”

People often begin to lose faith in God because of the results they faced from their life experiences. Some face things that seem cruel and unbearable while others are “confronted with the information presented from another viewpoint that rejects God” (Gospel Billboards). Elie was told by his father to never lose his faith in God, it would help him get through tough times and keep him strong. The faith is the only strong force that helped Elie Wiesel get through the Holocaust. Through experiences that involve cruel and unbearable moments, people start questioning whether God has the answers to life’s problems. This results in faith beginning to weaken, people stop communicating with God, which makes it easier for one’s faith to diminish. We encounter Elie questioning and refusing God, but also see his contradictory behavior he exhibits to praise. However, throughout the book, Eliezer witnesses and experiences things that leads him to lose his faith in his religion. The longer he stays in the concentration camps, the more he experiences and sees cruelty and suffering. Eliezer believes that people who pray to a God who allows their families to suffer and die are more stronger and forgiving to God. Elie was angry at God, he thought God didn’t deserve his praises or honors because he expected God to come save him but he never did. He observes people die and others around him slowly lose hope, starve, Elie ceases to believe that God could exist at all now. “Where He is? This

Later, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Elie was not able to celebrate the New Year with the other Jews in the camp. When the Rabbi said “Blessed be the Name of the Eternal,” Wiesel thought “Why, but why should I bless Him?” In these quotes, Wiesel’s frustration and anger is directed toward God because he has no one else to blame. He is appalled by everything happening around him, and cannot believe the God he spent all his time praying to was letting this happen. Wiesel’s faith in God waned while he was in the camps. Because he used to be a religious, Jewish person, losing his faith changes his

During his time in the concentration camps, Elie’s outlook on life shifted to a very pessimistic attitude, showing emotions and actions including rebellion, forgetfulness of humane treatment, and selfishness. Elie shows rebellion early in the Holocaust at the Solemn Service, a jewish ceremony, by thinking, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled” (Wiesel 67). Elie had already shifted his view on his religion and faith in God. After witnessing some of the traumas of the concentration camps, Elie questioned what he did to deserve such treatment. Therefore, he began to rebel against what he had grown up learning and believing. Not only had Elie’s beliefs changed, his lifestyle changed as well. When Elie’s foot swelled, he was sent to the doctor, where they put him “...in a bed with white sheets. I [he] had forgotten that people slept in sheets” (Wiesel 78). Many of the luxuries that Elie may have taken for granted have been stripped of their lives, leaving Elie and the other victims on a thin line between survival and death. By explaining that he forgot about many of these common luxuries, Elie emphasizes the inhumane treatment the victims of the Holocaust were put through on a daily basis.

Elie Wiesel’s God is more than a substantial part of his life. When Elie first

Forty-two years after entering the concentration camp for the first time, Elie Wiesel remarked, “Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope” (Nobel Lecture 1). This means a lot from someone who endured almost two years of the terror in the WWII concentration camps. During these two years, Elie endured the sadness of leaving his former life and faith behind, the pain of living off of scraps of bread, and the trepidation of the “selections”, where he almost lost his father. He watched the hanging of innocent people, was beat by Kapos and guards time after time, and marched in a death march right after having a foot surgery. Through all of this, he survived because he remained hopeful. Hope was all the Jewish people

The Holocaust was not only a way for the Nazis to purge the Jews, it was also a movement for a new way of thinking, that as long as the person in front of you holds a military-grade firearm there is nothing you can do to change your fate. In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his journey through life in nazi concentration camps. Elie struggles with his faith and morality as he and his father witness the horrors of the Holocaust. Night reveals that it’s in human nature to hope for survival through religion and faith, however it can also fail in the most trying of circumstances when you have to relent to authoritarianism.

Three days later, optimism still present, the Jews still refused to believe that God would let dreadful things occur to them even when “German army vehicles made their appearance on their streets” (9). The towns “impressions of the Germans were rather reassuring” (9) at that time, on the contrary of the bloodcurdling conceptions they later gained when the reality of the terrors of Germans had cropped up. Months later, Elie and the other Jews’ faiths become warped when they come back down to earth and the Germans true intentions strike as they enter their long expedition in the death camps.

The Jews in the Holocaust watched their families and loved ones get slaughtered every day, leading the victims to become numb and indifferent to what was going on around them. Elie began to lose hope after seeing so much cruelty and thought, “Indifference deadened the spirit. Here or elsewhere- what difference did it make? To die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was so long and never ending” (93). Elie gave up hope in himself, which is just as lethal as an angry Nazi, for truly believing you are incapable of something is the most belittling and dehumanizing thought of all. Not only did the Jews become numb to the violence, but the belief that it was wrong to act out violently against the Jews never crossed the Nazis’ minds. After routinely murdering numerous Jews who were “un-human” in the minds of the Nazis and Germans, the perpetrators began to believe with every fiber in their beings that what they were doing was for the world’s benefit. One day in the camps,

Elie expresses, “Are you in good health?-You... you...you and you… They pointed their fingers, the way one might choose cattle, or merchandise” (48-49). Elie is deteriorated into a mere beast and his identity is slowly being consumed by the collapsar of his oppressors. The Third Reich’s main goal of undermining all opposition of the “perfect race” destroys Elie’s and millions of people’s faith in their religion and their will to live in the hell they have been embarked upon by none other than

“Night” describes his personal experience in the concentration camp, where he was taken to being a boy. Germans forced Elie and other members of the Jewish community of Hungarian town Sighet to Ghettos. They left the whole families without any belongings and means to survive. But it was not enough: from Ghettos, people were transferred to concentration camps, where they were tortured and killed. But the book is not only about all the traumatic experiences that Jewish people had to withstand during World War II; it is about how poisonous and infectious xenophobia is.

When Elie arrived at the first concentration camp, he was a child, but when left he was no longer human. Elie’s character changed through his encounter of the Holocaust. Elie idolized his religion, Judaism, one relevant identification for him. Elie spent hours praying and learning about Judaism, but it was the reason he and his family were tormented for. Elie was so intrigued by Judaism, that he wanted someone a “master” to guide in his studies of Kabbalah, an ancient spiritual wisdom that teaches how to improve the lives (Wiesel 8). Furthermore, he loses hope in God and in life. Elie only had a few items when he arrived in the camp, one being his family, but that would soon be taken from him. When Elie and his family arrived at the camp in Auschwitz, he was kept by his father. He always gazed after his father, caring for him until his death.

When it comes to why people become embedded in their jobs?” The more an employee participates in both their professional and community life the more they develop a web of connections and relationships both on and off their job. Many employees remain in their current jobs because leaving the job would result in a severance or rearrangement of the connections that they built. The more connections an employee has the more embedded the employee is in their current job. There are three main types of connections that foster embeddedness, they are: links, fit, and sacrifice.