Death In Night By Elie Wiesel's Night

In the beginning of Night we see a young, innocent thirteen year old and deeply observant Wiesel, who wants to get closer to God and devotes his time studying Talmud by day, and at night the kabbalah with his friend and also mentor Moshie the Beatle. When Wiesel enters the Auschwitz concentration camp, his childhood and innocence are shattered when he witnesses men, women, and children being dumped into fiery graves. Throughout Night Elie Wiesel’s view about humanity and God changes, Wiesel starts to lose faith in God and question his existence, his view of humanity also changes when he sees how the exposure of human cruelty can deprive humans of their sense of morality and humanity.

People have survived many situations throughout the years. Some of the these situations have been life threatening and some have not been that bad. These situations have left people wrenched, mortified, and distressed. Elie Wiesel in Night is innocent, desperate, and numb. Overall, Wiesel is left broken. Night was written by Elie Wiesel and the book is about his personal experience about being a victim of the Holocaust.

Often, the theme of a novel extends into a deeper significance than what is first apparent on the surface. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the theme of night and darkness is prevalent throughout the story and is used as a primary tool to convey symbolism, foreshadowing, and the hopeless defeat felt by prisoners of Holocaust concentration camps. Religion, the various occurring crucial nights, and the many instances of foreshadowing and symbolism clearly demonstrate how the reoccurring theme of night permeates throughout the novel.

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” - George Bernard Shaw. George Shaw’s famous quote describes that to achieve, you must change yourself. On May 1944, Elie Wiesel and his family were forced out from his home in Sighet, Romania to live in Auschwitz, Germany. He and his two older sisters survived the holocaust, Elie then wrote his experience in 1960. During the span of the book, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the novel demonstrates that traumatic events can change a person drastically. In the beginning, Elie lived with his family in Germany, his mother, his father, and his three siblings. The Germans forced the Jews to hand over their valuables, live in ghettos and finally moving them to concentration camps, including Elie’s family. He was disunited from his mother and three siblings, but managed to stay with his father. At first when he entered the camp he was pessimistic and discouraged when he saw the townspeople crying including his father. After, Elie then learned to take care of himself and his father during tragic events, he stuck to his ambitions and values which led him to go through many obstacles , despite the limitations, and be free of the camp of Auschwitz. As he set out Eliezer was an immature and carefree 15 year old who developed into a responsible young adult.

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.

Wiesel then gave up, he figured there was no longer a chance that he could be saved which again led to darkness. Is this example, the darkness the night brings symbolises loss of hope, and becoming closer to death. Once Wiesel gave up trying, and claimed it was over, the light in his life got slightly dimmer, and he became closer to death.

When he awoke, he had realized that he also had changed, “The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded-and devoured-by a black flame,” (37). Wiesel’s youth burned away with the flames, fear and loss of hope also contributed to him being consumed and devoured- by a black flame. The flames had taken hundreds of lives away and seeing those murderous flames made Wiesel think about all the occurring deaths and that had killed him emotionally. Wiesel continues to reflect later on, “...I no longer pleaded for anything… I was nothing but ashes now…” (68). Fire is being used again as a symbol of death, except this time, Wiesel reassures himself that he is dead not physically but emotionally and feels like he is

Night begins with the narrator, Elie, talking about Moishe the Beadle, who is described as the “jack-of-all-trades” in a shtibl (Weisel, 21). He then continues by talking about his family. He goes back to talk about his deep conversations with Moishe and their evenings spent together. One day, the foreign Jews of Sighet, where he lives, were expelled. This included Moishe. They were taken away in cattle cars by the Hungarian police. Months past and one day, Elie saw Moishe sitting on a bench near the synagogue. He tells Elie about what happened to him; how he and the other Jews were transported and forced to dig their own graves in the forest. Luckily, Moishe had managed to escape. He had come back to warn the Jews in Sighet of what to come.

In a desperate moment for survival, a person will act in a spontaneous manner to

As their time in the concentration camp continues, the conditions there worsen. The prisoners are soon forced into a treacherous forty-two mile run in the icy cold, which makes them struggle between life the death. During this march, one thing keeps Wiesel’s will to live alive and that is his father. This shows one of Wiesel’s weakest moments, where he contemplates giving up numerous times. Exhaustion takes over his body, and the only thing he can think about is the pleasures that death would bring him. Wiesel’s mind overpowers him and he reflects, “Death wrapped itself around me till I was stifled. It stuck to me. I felt that I could touch it. The idea of dying, of no longer being, began to fascinate me” (82). However, his father needs him, and that is truly what drives him to keep pushing until the end. They stay alive for each other, which shows how much they really care about the other. While Wiesel rests in the shed after the run, Rabbi Eliahou, a very well-liked man, comes in looking for his son. He and his son have been sticking together for three years. Wiesel expresses that he has not seen him, without realizing that this is false. The Rabbi’s son purposely left him, to strengthen his own chances of survival. Wiesel is taken aback by this, and astonishingly begins to pray. He thinks, “My God,

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.

Night, written by Elie Wiesel, tells the terrifying experience in the concentration camps that many Jews were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout most of the novel, Elie Wiesel tells about how many prisoners, including himself, lost faith in God. During the Holocaust many groups of people, especially Jews, were taken to concentrations camps and treated in the most inhumane way. Many were taken away from their homes, and lost everything that was once their own. In order to survive, many Jews encountered such brutal difficulties. They were worked to death, starved to death, killed, and all because they were Jews. Upon being taken away, many were unaware with what was happening outside their own homes.

Elie Wiesel’s Night is about what the Holocaust did, not just to the Jews, but, by extension, to humanity. The disturbing disregard for human beings, or the human body itself, still to this day, exacerbates fear in the hearts of men and women. The animalistic acts by the Nazis has scarred mankind eternally with abhorrence and discrimination.

Wiesel struggled a lot with his faith in Night. Before the Holocaust he had full faith in God. But his faith and trust in God started to slip throughout his time in the concentration camp. The breaking point in where Wiesel completely lost his faith in God was when the young pipel was hung. After witnessing

In the novel, Night, Elie Wiesel is a dynamic character shown through the conflict, character versus nature, where he went from being defeated to defiant in the personified death in the concentration camps. Through his journey in the concentration camps and struggle for survival, Wiesel encounters death several times, he either witnesses death’s ways or outlives them. While being in Auschwitz, one of the largest concentration camps from the Holocaust during World War Two, Wiesel had grown numb to the effects of death, he had outgrown the disbelief of how cruel the world could be, of how God could remain silent in such a time of need and help, “Death enveloped me, it suffocated me. It stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea