Elie Wiesel: A Holocaust Survivor

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....” –Elie Wiesel expressed shortly after his harsh experience with the Holocaust. As many read through Elie’s book Night, they recognize what Elie fought through while he was staying in the Concentration Camps. People have realized the brutal conditions that the he had gone through and have came to the thought of how it effected his future and what he has done ever since the horrible Holocaust.

many times during the book it talks about Wiesel’s problems. Elie’s first problem would be when he was in Buna, a concentration camp. This was a problem for Wiesel because he didn't have food, water, and at sometimes air. In the book Elie says “ At ten o’clock we were given our daily ration of bread” (Wiesel 34 ). This quote shows how that they only got bread once a day from their SS Officers, and that they didn't have food. Another problem Wiesel had is the loss of family. Elie got taken away from his mom and sister when they were deported on the train but got to stay with his father. Elie says “ I certainly do. But on one condition: I want to stay with my father” (Wiesel 35). With Elie being taken away from his mom and sister, he wanted to stay with his father through the whole thing. Wiesel’s father was his strength to stay alive. Elie had tough adversities he had to go through in his life and he was strong and overcame them.

The Holocaust began around 1933 when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and leader of the Nazi Party. During that time, the first concentration camp, Dachau, was established to torture and kill Jewish people. Soon after, in 1935, Nuremberg Race Laws against Jews were decreed and depriving Jews of German citizenship. Germany then invaded Poland, starting World War II in Europe. With the start of World War II came many more concentration camps, and millions of deaths. Six million European Jews lost their lives during this horrific time. Many survivors shared their stories after they were freed, so that the world would know of the horrors they experienced. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, told his story in his book, Night. Elie Wiesel was a teenager during the Holocaust, but lived on into his eighties and continued to speak out against what the Nazi’s did to his family.

The Holocaust was a time of great suffering and hopelessness for Jewish people. About two thirds of the entire Jewish population was brutally killed. One third of all Jews persevered and survived the appalling events happening in and out of the concentration camps. One boy, out of that one third that survived and pushed through was Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor, displays stamina in his memoir physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Elie Wiesel experienced 2 years of events that nothing will be able to amount to. After the deportation of his village, he survived through 4 concentration camps in a year. The camps were Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald, and Gleiwitz. His father died in Buchenwald in January 1945 and Wiesel had to survive through the rest of the Holocaust with no motivation. After the Holocaust, he spent a couple of years in a French orphanage.

There are many records of first person experiences in the Holocaust that show what it was like to live during the time period, and most records are the victims; telling their story. During the Holocaust, about 6 million jews were killed. A spectator witnessing this horrendous brutality was Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel was born in Transilvania and was sent to a death camp when he was around 15. He witnessed horrible things and wrote a book about his experiences in 3 Austwitz death camps. The plot of his memoir,”Night” follows him through his life in the death camps with his father and how they stay together until the enevitable death of his weak and ailing father. A big part of the memoir is how their relationship changes throughout the story.

Who is Elie Wiesel ? Elie Wiesel  was a holocaust survivor. He struggled during the holocaust, but he managed to fight threw. He survived during this horrible time period where everyone kept silent. Many times he thought to himself that he was not going to survive the days would get worse for him. The Nazis would treat them horrible they also lived in horrible  conditions.  Him and the other men and children there would only get a little portion of foods. Many of them would starve and some would share between them some food they would

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said “If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be just the one” (Wiesel, Preface to the New Translation). Growing up he experienced many hardships that he'd never expect to go through. In his book Night he recounted his experiences and depicted everything that was going on during the Holocaust. Elie’s experiences shaped him into a completely different person and caused him to view things differently. As Elie spent more time in camp he saw a lack of justice which caused him to change his perspective of God; he was not denying God’s existence, but questioned his absolute justice, still he did not lose all faith.

A trouble that their family faced was being separated from one another. For instance Elie Wiesel says, “That was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father’s hand: we were alone” (22). This is the point when Wiesel and his father were separated from his mother and sisters because when his family got to the camps they were split up by gender. Wiesel was then left alone with his father at his side and never saw his mother or sisters ever again. His family was taken apart at the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Another way in which Elie Wiesel’s family was troubled was with death. At the end of the book his father dies because an SS officer had hit him with a truncheon on the head while he was ill. For example Wiesel states, “In my father’s place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn and carried him to the crematory” (81). This means that Wiesel’s father has died either because of the hit that he had received, his illness. or because he was put in the crematory. This must have been evey upsetting for Wiesel because first of all his family was separated and then eventually died or were killed. These were some ways in which Wiesel and his family were affected during The

Elie Wiesel experienced several horrors throughout the Holocaust. As a boy, he lost his family and his faith in his own religion because of the mass slaughter of six million Jews along with several different races and religions. Elie describes scenes that a fifteen year old child should never have to see such as frantic families lined up for a death in fire, bodies crushed all over as people ran them over, and babies being thrown into pits of fire.

Elie Wiesel is a Jewish teenager. He leads a very religious life until he, and thousands of other Jews are placed into concentration camps. Throughout his book, Night, we learn about the struggles in the concentration camp. They are forced to do hard labor, sleep in freezing temperatures, and eat very little while being subject to watching hundreds die every day for no reason other than their faith. They were being dehumanized.

In the book Night written by a jew that was in concentration camps, oh yeah his name was Elie Wiesel. In Night Elie Talks about the living conditions were so horrible in the camps. Sadly in those camps he changed and, his relationships changed too. Relationships with his father, God, and even himself after all of the horrible things that happened to him in the Camps.

As war broke out in Europe during 1939, no one could either imagine or believe the terror that Adolf Hitler would soon bring to the lives of Jewish people. Drawing from his paranoia and a drive for a world Nazi power, Hitler singled out the Jews as the cause for problems in Germany and began to carry out his plan for the destruction of a part of humanity. Hitler not only persecuted the Jews of Germany, but he also targeted the Jews in Poland and other parts of Europe, such as Transylvania, which was the home of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

I believe Elie must have felt awkward and nostalgic when he returned to Sighet. Elie had been traumatized by the events of Auschwitz in a way that he would never be able to recover. He had taken time to heal in France for many years and try to make sense of what he had been through. Returning to a place where he had previously only had happy memories must have been strange, like coming home from a trip finding out your house has not changed at all, even though you might have. When Elie described throwing back a watch he buried I thought it was a perfect example of this. I believe he must have thrown it back because he remembered the person he was when he buried it and knew he wasn’t that person any more, so why should he keep it? I believe

Elie Wiesel was 15 when the Nazis came for the 15,000 Jews of his hometown of Sighet, Transylvania, in May 1944. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his mother and sister were murdered within hours, while he was put to work as a slave laborer. Eight months later, the Germans evacuated the camp and forced the survivors on a death march that ended at Buchenwald. Wiesel was one of the few still alive when the Americans arrived in April 1945.