Elie Wiesel Holocaust Survivor Essay

During World War II, Hitler was putting Jewish people in concentration camps and was ultimately trying to wipe them out. Many Jewish people didn't want to believe what was happening to them. The book Night, by Elie Wiesel, shows just how many people deceived themselves to continue to have hope. Many Jewish people believed things would get better, and didn't actually believe that things could very well get worse. By having this deception, they didn't think ahead to what could happen to them or how bad things could turn out for them. The Jews showed self-deception by not believing Moshies warnings, when they were forced to give up some of their everyday rights, and by having false optimism when they had to move to the ghettos.

They stayed in certain homes of jewish people and they seemed so polite but, distant. Never made any rude remarks, and “...sometimes even smiled at the lady of the house.” (page10) However on the eighth day of passover the germans revealed themselves as the monsters that they had been hearing of, they had arrested the the jewish leaders the community. The jews were not allowed to leave their houses for three days and if they did they would get the death penalty. Moishe came to Elie’s house and yelled “I warned you.’ And left without waiting for a response.” (page

Although Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust, many other groups were targeted based on racial or political grounds. Other groups that were attacked by the Nazis included LGBTQ individuals, the physically and mentally disabled, Roma(gypsies), Poles, Slavic Peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and members of political opposition groups. These Non-Jewish victims were not considered as victims of the Holocaust. So, why did Adolf Hitler kill 11 million people? First, we need to inspect Hitler’s crazy ideas. Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany during the Holocaust. He came to power in 1933, when Germany was experiencing financial trouble. Hitler promised the Germans that he would bring them great wealth and he stated that he would make

These victims were desperate for some relief. Wiesel and many others were tortured beyond belief. In Night, Wiesel says, “Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings! “The Hungarian police were screaming.That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.” In this quote, Wiesel tells the reader that the way they were treated was the reasons that they knew they were going to die. The way that Wiesel and the other victims was treated was enough to be so desperate that some of them saw death as the only way

At one point in Elie’s story, his dad is beaten by a Gypsy inmate in charge of the barrack Elie and his father are staying in. Elie recounts “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in from of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh!” (39). Another example of the theme of emotional death is when Elie and other prisoners are being shipped on a train to a new place. People are dying while on the train. Every once in a while, the train will stop and authority figures will collect the dead from the train cars. Elie says “It never stopped snowing. We remained lying on the floor for days and nights, one on top of the other, never uttering a word. We were nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merely waited for the next stop, to unload our dead” (100). A third and final example of emotional death found in the book

The greatest change to Elie Wiesel’s identity was his loss of faith in God. Before he and his family were moved to the camps, Wiesel was a religious little boy who cried after praying at night (2). When the Hungarian police come to force the Jews to move to the ghettos, they pulled Elie from his prayers (13). Even on his way to Auschwitz, stuffed inside the cattle car with other terrified Jews, Wiesel gave thanks to God when told he would be assigned to labor camps (24). After a few days in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel heard about the crematory and the fact that the Nazis were killing the sick, weak, and young. In his first night in the camp, Wiesel experienced his first crisis of faith: Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. …Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust (32).

He originally thought that Hungary was a safe and inhabitable place. Even when Wiesel arrived at the camps, he didn’t feel threatened. Wiesel stated in the book that, "We didn't know. Nobody had told us. He couldn't believe his ears" (Page 30). Nobody in the town was well informed about the events occurring outside of Sighet, and as a result, nobody grew a strong fear towards the uprising Nazis. Wiesel was in denial of the actions of the Nazis until the entered the camps, where he soon began to deny the events that were occurring at the camps. He thought that life would continue as normal in the camps, even though he was subject to crude treatment and insufficient food. Soon, he would deny that anything safe would ever happen to him and his father. As Wiesel stated in the book, "How we would have liked to believe that. We pretended, for what if one of us still did believe?" (Page 46). Wiesel at first worried about the whereabouts of his mother and sisters, but soon he resorted to believing that they were already dead - he doubted that they would survive past the first day. As time went on, Wiesel began losing more and more of his sanity and doubted that he would eventually make it out of the camp alive. When veterans tried to tell their stories of survival, Wiesel stated, “‘Enough! Be quiet!’ I begged them. ‘Tell your stories tomorrow, or some

The book Night opens in the town of Signet where Elie Wiesel, the author ,

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).

Firstly, Wiesel is bothered by the fact that everyone in the world can remain silent while the Jews and the others in the concentration camps are being put through such terrible torture. Eliezer asks, “How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?”(32) There were numerous people that eventually found out what was happening at these concentration camps, but chose to turn a blind eye. Although they were not directly involved in the slaughtering of the Jews, they did remain silent during this time and by ignoring it they are encouraging the

In the 1930’s the Jewish population in Romania was around half a million. However, during World War II most of those Jews sent to the labour barracks or death camps (Wiesel, 2008).

“Why do you pray? He asked after a moment. Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (Pg.5). Moishe the Beadle asked Elie Wiesel some questions that Elies did not know how to answered, he prayed everyday, he was alive but he didn't know why, he breathe and he didn't know why neither. But the real answer only Elie could find it within himself. The book is based on real-life fact about how the Germans or best known as Nazis came and slave all the Jews, they took away their freedom and their happiness. And this tell book the the story of the holocaust in the point of view of a person named Elie Wiesel. Elements of dark and light can change your faith, how you believe and in what do you believe, but how can it be changed

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.

In the book, Elie talks a little about life before the Germans came in and forced them to give up their humanity. During this time, life was fairly normal and Elie spent his time studying the Zohar with a man name Moishe. Even when Moishe was forced to leave, because he was a foreign jew, not much changed; he continued studying the kabbalistic works and building a relationship with god. It isn’t until Moishe’s return that people start becoming slightly worried, but it still wasn’t enough to really cause a stir within the community. Most citizens just assumed Moishe was crazy whenever he tried to tell people his experiences away from the town. When German police came into the city, people finally began to worry. It was known throughout the town that Hitler had planned to destroy the race of jews but people didn’t believe that one man could manage to kill an entire race. For a time people and the police coexisted with some amount of peace, but then came the ghettos.

Hitler thought of the Jewish population as a worthless society and treated the individuals as worthless creatures. When Hitler came to power, he established the camps "for the purpose of isolation, punishing, torturing, and killing Germans suspected of opposition to his regime."10 The Germans wanted to guarantee the death of as many Jews as possible "while extracting some useful labor from the doomed."11 The camps were set up technically and psychologically to