Elie Wiesel Reflection

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.

Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on 15 year old Elie’s experiences during the Holocaust. Elie endures circumstances which are so extreme to the point they are almost unbelievable. Elie’s account of his experiences during his life in the concentration camps has taught readers around the world about how to appreciate everything they take for granted, how desperation can make people do crazy things, and the importance of motivation in tough times.

The murder of thousands can not only impact the universe, but the ones that live in it. For instance, victims of the Happiest had to deal with, not only losing all of their loved ones but the deaths of others around them. In “Night”, Elie is expiring death, of not only his loved ones, also other Jews who were taken by Hitler. The loss of your family is petrifying. But watching others have their lives slipped away from their fingertips, is indubitably scary. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, Elie changes drastically throughout the book, because of the time he spent in Auschwitz, one of the most infamous concentration camps.

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

The actions the Nazis committed during WWII were unbearable for even the strongest people. Prisoners were tortured, starved, and slaughtered just for being Jewish. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, had to endure the atrocities at the age of 15. Wiesel describes these events in his memoir Night. A result of the dehumanization and other cruelty that he faces leads Elie Wiesel to a loss of his faith.

It can be hard for someone to imagine that a person he/she loves and praises would have the potential to betray him or her. Elie feels that way every single day when God betrays him in the novel Night, he then finds himself questioning his faith very often. Through this text, the Elie Wiesel begins to lose his faith as well as many other prisoners in the camp and he believes God is just watching him suffer and not helping him or anyone else. Elie was a strong believer of God, but Elie realized God wouldn’t do this to the Jews and Elie felt is was best to stop believing in someone who isn’t helping him. He wondered if good things happened anymore. Therefore, Elie starts to lose his faith when God no longer loves him and doesn’t help him when he needs the most help.

The Holocaust was a horrible period of punishment and a misery to the people who lived through this period of time. Up to 6 million jews were estimated of being killed during this period of time. This has affected and impacted many people’s lives and in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, he will forever reminisce his experience in a Nazi concentration camp during the holocaust. As a result of his experiences during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel changes from a religious, sensitive little boy to a spiritually dead, unemotional man.

Throughout time, Jewish communities have been treated with immense hate and exclusion from other cultures because no one accepted their religion. Coming to the time before WWII, events like Kristallnacht demonstrated the despise for Jews that dwelled inside the general population of Germany when the Germans went to Jewish houses and stores to burn and destroy them. In the course of WWII, they were harassed, abused, tortured and ruined, as all of their business stocks and assets were taken away. During the expanse of this horrific battle, Jews were forced to live in designated areas known as concentration camps where they had to overcome obstacles such as hunger, freezing temperatures, and the loss of precious family members. These camps were used to fulfill Hitler’s intent to annihilate the Jewish population from the face of the planet and this dangerous idea was called “purify the country”. In total, there were about 25 of these camps built where 6 million Jews died, including 1.5 million children. Auschwitz was a camp which was responsible for 1 million deaths alone, and this is the camp where Elie Wiesel was first sent to endure the hatred of the Nazis. This camp changed the way Elie Wiesel viewed the world because he saw and experienced things that will stayed with him forever. He was transformed into a new person who neglected his religion, failed to protect the one he held dear to him, and put his

The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time

Over six million Jews were killed in the brutal events of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the horrible event, has recalled his story in his memoir Night. Elie and his father are Jewish, meaning, they practice the religion of Judaism. Judaism is a monotheistic religion based off the teaching of the Torah. In Night, there is a shift in Elies religious beliefs throughout the memoir. The change in his beliefs had a lasting effect on Elie and his survival though the Holocaust. Throughout the many concentration camps Elie and his father lived in, many other prisoners faced the same dilemma of keeping their faith.

Many of Jews in the camp would work day and night, hours without food, and barely got any sleep. During the solemn service on the night of Rosh Hashanah, Wiesel thought, “But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, burned, what do they do?” (68). Wiesel had begun to feel angry at God due to the effects of emotional death from all the death and mistreatment in the camp. When Wiesel first arrived to Auschwitz, he claimed,“Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky,” (34).

In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when he started to lose his faith due to his experiences at the concentration camps, for example, ¨ But now, I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was no longer able to lament God the accused. My eyes had opened and i was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man,¨ (Wiesel 68). Wiesel was a very faithful and hopeful boy but due to his experiences in the concentration camp, he lost his faith in God and in others. He believed that there was no God because of the things he would see and the overwhelming inhumanity he would suffer. Two significant themes related to inhumanity discussed in the book Night by Elie Wiesel are loss of faith and becoming closer to loved ones.

When events take a turn for the worse, some of what would seem to be detrimental actually become beneficial. During World War II, the Nazi Party believed that the Non-Aryan citizens of Europe were the cause of the recent downfall that was occurring in the continent. Specifically, Hitler and his forces targeted Jews mercilessly. Elie Wiesel, at the time just a young boy from Sighet , was incarcerated for merely existing as a Jew. Ten years after liberation, he documents the reality of his time in the camps. Wiesel’s loss of faith results in the strengthening of his relationship with his father.

In the beginning of the book Wiesel was extremely religious and thought that religion was very important. He is so passionate about god and judaism that he “felt the need to cry” whenever he prayed (Wiesel 4). His views about his god held steady for a while in the concentration camp but were diminished slightly with every passing day. He witnessed his god’s people being tortured alive, he saw wailing children flug into pits of flame, and he saw his neighbors and friends brutally murdered. Later in the book another prisoner asked where god was during the execution of a child and Wiesel said to himself that god was “here hanging from this gallows” because in Wiesel’s eyes god was dead (Wiesel 65).

In his book, Wiesel describes to the reader his, and so many other Jew’s, experience with the Holocaust. First, Wiesel starts with what life was like prior to the beginning of Hitler’s pogroms, how peaceful everything was and of his studies concerning Judaism. At one point in 1942, he points out that all the foreign Jews, including a nomadic individual who was helping in his religious education, were deported from the town on cattle cars. His teacher escaped, and told the town that the prisoners were forced to dig a large pit, and then the guards proceeded to shoot each deportee and throw them into the hole. The Jews response? They laughed and said the man was obviously crazy. Wiesel noticed that the man seemed broken, he no longer studied religion and prayed, but everyone still dismissed his