Elie Wiesel: Holocaust Survivor

Elie experienced many changes, as a person while he was in Auschwitz. Before Elie was sent to Auschwitz, he was just a small naive child that new very little

Elie loses his faith after thinking about how God might not exist because if he does than he would let this ever happen. Elie loses his innocence after seeing the two corpses lying side by side, father and son. Elie kept his thoughtful ness and love because he didn’t want to leave his father to die or for myself to die because if he died than they would do unspeakable thing to his father. He loses a lot of things at Auschwitz including faith, innocence and his father. Many traumatic experiences are bad for ones health and could cause long-term illnesses including

Elie Wiesel was a Jewish American born in Romania. His principles were influenced by being raised in a heavily religious and liberal family. In the 1940s, his own country forced his family to flee to the ghettos, and not long after, Wiesel, “a young Jewish boy from a small town,” was captured by Nazis, waking up to the perilous realization of “eternal infamy”(Wiesel). In April 1945, after enduring through starvation and punishment, he was finally liberated.

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’s father died of dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion in Buchenwald, only weeks before the liberating army came to the gates of the camp. After the liberation, Elie described how their first act as free men was to throw themselves upon the provisions for such were the inhumane savages they had become.

Page 34, “…Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. 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.” From this one quote you can most certainly tell that Elie has been living through some extremely tough times in his life right now. You can also tell that just being a part of the concentration camp and knowing that if you don’t die there is a good chance that one of your family members or friends will, it will always be permanently engraved in Elies’ memories. And this has definitely had a huge impact on his life “He was not alone in having lost faith during those days of selection,” Page 76. Elie is talking about the Rabbi losing his faith when he states that the Rabbi is not alone and Elie himself is also losing faith. The selection was when the Germans and doctors looked at how the prisoner’s were health wise and if they where unhealthy they would kill them and put them in the crematoria’s. This, however, was tough for many of the prisoners because most of them where starving and unhealthy, a lot of the people didn’t pass the selections, but those who did

A time where people were forced to leave their homes and everything they had in possession. This is something that happens to Elie Wiesel author and main character of NIGHT. Elie and his family are from jewish descent and are dehumanized by the Germans and forced into labour camps to work. They never knew what dangers they had ahead of them always having ignorance only to face the consequences. To lose and to have everything only to be gone in a second never to be returned. Throughout his journey he finds himself powerless but only to find he stills has his dignity. He even finds his humanity for his father for the last person that was there to support him and care for him.

Elie, his father, and the prisoners had to run in the snow more than 40 miles to another concentration camp, deeper in Germany. When they stopped a man, Rabbi Eliahou, asked if Elie and his father if they had seen his son. Elie had and he realized that the Rabbi’s son had “wanted to get rid of his father…to free himself from an encumbrance” (Wiesel 87). They then got on cattle trains that took them to the next concentration camp, Buchenwald. They passed by villages and when people threw bread in, the prisoners began to fight to the death for it. One son began to attack his own father for a piece and killed him, only to be killed the next moment himself. Soon after they arrived in Buchenwald, Eliezer’s father was very weak and sick. A part of Elie felt that if he could get rid of his father he “could use all [his] strength to struggle for [his] own survival” (Wiesel 101). He was very ashamed, even more so when his father died and he felt “free at last” (Wiesel 105).

Elie Wiesel was an adolescent boy who was subjugated to overwhelming difficulties in the Holocaust. He faced many challenges, such as the Jews having to leave their homes and their cherished possessions to go to the death camps. (Night) Another difficulty that Wiesel overcame was the inhumane treatment he received for being a different religion. It was compulsory for Wiesel,

The Holocaust was a deadly event that killed millions of Jews in Germany. Nazis would starve, hit, and most times kill them in result of hate against their religion. Elie Wiesel, one of the most famous Holocaust survivors, was just 15 when he began to witness these happening to his friends and family. When Elie became free, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and became an author. He wrote a book about his traumatic experiences while he was in the camps that tortured and abolished Jews. He left his fenced neighborhood called the Ghettos for Auschwitz where he was tortured and put to work. He marched through cold snow and shivered through long nights, trying to stay with his father. After experiencing the trauma of the Holocaust, Elie changed the relationship he had of God and his father.

As Jews worked and walked around the camps the soldiers would yell “Faster you filthy dogs” (page 85), The Jews were treated like animals during their worst moments. Jews were tricked by the Nazis as they went into the gas chambers thinking they would be taking a shower, the gas chambers killed so many innocent Jews. Day to night the jews would work not knowing if the next day they would continue to live. Elie lost his mother and with his mother went his faith, Elie felt like God was not doing any god for the Jews as they were all dying as well as getting beat. The day Elie saw a young boy get hung in front of his own eyes all he could say was “That night the soup tasted like of corpses” (page 65), the horrendous things Elie saw killed his soul and belief in the

Elie Wiesel—a Holocaust survivor and award-winning human rights activist—passionately gave his speech, “The Perils of Indifference,” while in the White House on April 12, 1999. The speech was part of the Millennium Lecture series, which was hosted by President Bill Clinton and his wife. Mrs. Hilary Clinton introduced Elie as well, saying: "It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity." Indeed, the events in Kosovo created an effective environment that Wiesel could use to tell the audience about some of his experiences during the Holocaust and to communicate why humanity must fight against the evil of indifference.

Night by Elie Wiesel was published in 1955 and narrates the author’s personal experiences during the Holocaust. Young Elie Wiesel recounts his struggles as he was forced into various concentration camps through his writing. The events that are written in Wiesel’s Night exemplify the brutality evident during the 1940’s Nazi Era. Eliezar Wiesel was born on on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania, now Romania. He attended a nearby yeshiva, a Jewish institution that studies traditional religious texts, until he was fifteen years old.

6 million Jewish people died during the Holocaust and there were 100s of camp heads responsible for killing them. Approximately 900,000 survived and Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 of them. Most of the survivors, however, were liberated by the red army one of those people being Elie Wiesel. Both of these men went through separate conflicts that tore them away from their family and friends. They together dealt with inner and outer struggle, the differences between schindler's reactions, family and conflicts to Elie's are both major and minor.

Elie and his family were removed from their home in Sighet, Romania in the spring of 1944. From there, they were transferred to many concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Buna, over the course of the following year. He was fifteen years old when he struggled through the persecution plagued upon them by the Nazis. Throughout his time at the camps, he witnessed many atrocities, including murder by weapons, fire, and hanging, that threatened to strip him of his morals and tore apart his faith in God. By the time Elie and his fellow survivors were liberated by the Americans in April, 1945, Elie had lost both his parents and his siblings to the concentration camps