Elie Wiesel Quotes

Before the atrocities within the Holocaust take place Wiesel's relationship with his father is distant and cold. Ellie writes “My father wept. It was the first time I had ever seen him weep. I had never imagined that he could”(Wiesel 16). By stating that he couldn't imagine his father cry, it hammers home the idea of how removed Elie was from his father's emotions. There is an emotional disconnect between them; expressing emotion wasn't prevalent. This allows for a harsh contrast to the emotions felt by both Wiesel and his father after they arrive at Auschwitz. When Wiesel describes his father at the beginning of the book he describes him by stating “My father was a cultured, rather unsentimental man. There was never any display of emotion, even at

Wiesel’s inclusion of this quote shows readers that he was appalled by the inhuman prisoners and concentration camp leaders. One of the reasons for Wiesel becoming so traumatized by the evils of humanity is his prior belief that people would help each other in times of need. Halperin writes, “Before coming to Auschwitz, Eliezer had believed that twentieth-century man was civilized. He had supposed that people would try to help one another in difficult times; certainly his father and teachers had taught him that every Jew is responsible for all other Jews” (Halperin 33). Convinced that people were kind and that Jews would help one another, Wiesel was greatly disappointed after coming to a tragic realization in the concentration camps. Wiesel was robbed, pushed, beaten, and betrayed by his fellow Jews at the camps. Contrary to his prior belief that Jews should be working together, the other Jews invested in themselves. They cared, solely, about their own well being. In including the evils of the other prisoners, Wiesel is able to show readers that due to the lack of innocence within the concentration camps, it was inevitable for him to lose his

“Fire! I see a fire! I see a fire” (Wiesel 24)! Mrs. Schächter yelled to the other people on the train, warning them about what was going to happen. In the book Night Elie describes the life that he had during the Holocaust. This book is about how a twelve year old boy puts his old life behind and illustrates the many hardships that Hitler caused the Jewish people.

Fire represents a lot of the things in this novel. A woman name Mrs. Schachter was howling, pointing through the window. “Look! Look at this fire! This terrible fire! Have mercy on me!” (pg 25) Elie said him and the other saw a real fire this time. “This time we saw flames rising from a tall chimney into a black sky.” (pg. 28) Elie said they stared at the flames, “We stared at the flames in the darknes, A wretched stench floated in the air.” (pg. 28) And in front of them the the flaming smoke was the smell of burning flesh.

His father is his only hope, and Wiesel was his father’s. Wiesel truly want to be with his father, for he explains, “I ran outside to look for him” (Wiesel 78). Wiesel proves how much he loves and cares for his father when he risks re-injury and re-infection of his foot just to see him. When his father finally passes away, Wiesel seems to be broken. The man who kept him alive this whole time was finally gone. Wiesel recalls, “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep.” (Wiesel 106).

Prisoners of the Holocaust spoke not only of religious faith disintegrating, but also how their faith in humanity depleted. Wiesel recounts how one prisoner said, “I’ve got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He’s the only one who’s kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people” (77). The only person that the prisoners can put any of their trust into is the one who is slowly killing them. Another instance of loss of faith in humanity is when Wiesel witnesses the son of a rabbi he knew run away from his father. The son tries to escape his dying father so that he no longer has to take care of him and can selfishly live on. After watching this Wiesel finds himself praying to a god he no longer believes in, “My God, Lord of the Universe, give me the strength to never do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done” (87). No matter how tough it is to go on, Wiesel will not give up. He will continue to live through the miserable conditions of the Holocaust just so that he does not give up on his father, the only person he has faith left

Before Wiesel traveled to this gruesome death camp, he showed an abundance of positive traits. Some of these being his love for his religion, his strong hope for his future, and his powerful, loving family. In the first few pages Elie confesses his love for his religion and his ambition to pursue it to a teacher of the Jewish religion. He says that “...I told him how unhappy I was not to be able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar…” (5). He was stating that he wanted to branch off of his current religion and learn a new form of it, but he was limited because no one in his area also studied this form of Judaism. We can also learn that he was hopeful because you can tell that he is still trying to learn this other religion. Elie also writes that “Naturally, we refused to be separated” (20). He was speaking about his family in this quote and how he and his sisters had the opportunity to leave their mom and dad so that they could get to a safer place with the family maid. The mother did not want to go, so no one went; Instead they stuck together in the ghettos. They had an immensely strong family bond and it is shown through this passage. The children chose their family over a more certain safety. The next quote came after they were all in cattle carts, and were traveling to the new place. Elie recalls “It was as though madness had infected all of us” (27). Elie was scared during this time, but also reserved. He just kept to himself on while he was in this cart that was heading somewhere that he did not know.

As Elie gets used to his new life in such a hellish state, he realizes that the trusting and faithful child that he once had been had been taken away along with his family and all else that he had ever known. While so many others around him still implore the God of their past to bring them through their suffering, Wiesel reveals to the reader that although he still believes that there is a God, he no longer sees Him as a just and compassionate leader but a cruel and testing spectator.

Elie Wiesel portrays how the Holocaust emotionally impacted him throughout his entire memoir, Night. A significant emotional challenge for him was determining a way to keep his father and him alive, especially as times got more difficult as the story continued. Elie saw many boys abandoning their fathers. For instance, Zalman was running alongside Elie in transport, while aware he was ahead of his father. Elie assumed that Zalman thought his father was a gratuitous obstacle for survival. Or when Meir-intentional or not- killed his father for bread. He was determined not to echo their methods. Though, as time went on, that goal got harder to achieve. Men would tell him that his father's death was inevitable, he should be saving himself, and he “could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup” (Wiesel 111; ch.8). He considered this “only [for] a fraction of a second, but it

"Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust." (Page 133) The are the words of Elie Wiesel in the book “Night”. The book takes place during World War II while Elie is only 15 years old and is forced to go to a concentration camp, Auschwitz. He and his father are separated from the rest of his family and has Elie working in the camp while taking care of his father. The more time he spends in the camp the more changes he starts to develop.

Elie Wiesel, who was a Nobel-Prize winner who survived the Holocaust. He was born on September 30th, 1938 in Sighet Romania but sadly died July 2nd, 2016 at the age of 87. For many years he taught Judaic studies at a university and also served as a visiting scholar at Yale. Elie Wiesel became very famous for writing his books. He started to write because he wanted to write about how his experience was of the Holocaust. His father's liberal expression judaism and spiritual beliefs of his grandmother also influenced him. Loss of religious faith is what Elie based all his books on. The Holocaust made many lives stop believing the Jew religion but some continued (biography.com). Elie Wiesel influenced the society and promoted the understanding

Cruelty in a piece of writing is often important to the theme. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, the Nazis, prisoners and other Germans cruelty impacts the theme of man’s inhumanity to man greatly. Adolf Hitler blamed all of Germany’s problems on people who were not full-blooded Germans and tried to exterminate them during the Holocaust. He did this because it would

The Apple Needs it’s Tree In a short period of time a young boy named Eliezer was thrown into the Holocaust head-on with nothing but his father and his whits. The same can be said for hundreds of other young boys trying to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. The memoir Night showcases the struggle of a boy named Eliezer and his father to survive the Holocaust.

This tragic event in history created many famous quotes and poems, such as “night” and “at first they came for the communist”

"I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." (Wiesel 81) He made the Jews lose hope in themselves, their religion, their family, and most of all lose faith in their god. “And in spite myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God who I no longer believed in.”