Elie Wiesel Reflection

In class we previously read the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. This book told the story of young Elis’s life as he suffered through the holocaust. As we all know the holocaust was a very dark period, where millions upon millions lost their lives. Prisoners from all over were taken and jailed in concentration camps where they were tortured endless with no boundaries. Along the way to liberation many lost hope and gave up completely. Certain traumatizing events affected the prisoner's hope along with the inner and outer forces.

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

Kids tend to rebel against their parents as they grow older. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls his experiences with his family during World War II. His mother and sisters were taken away from him as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz, only his father remained. Elie Wiesel witnessed many terrible events during his first night at camp; the only thing that kept him in line was his father. Elie Wiesel’s father kept him from possibly killing himself. When Elie Wiesel lives in the concentration camp with his fellow Jews, he begins to question the fairness of God, who he had followed his entire life. Elie Wiesel lost faith in God, particularly the faith that He would use His divine power to help him, and he began to rely on his father instead, which gave him more reason to live.

The date is April 11, 1945. A 17 year old boy looks towards the ominous gates of the Buchenwald concentration camp after nearly two years of misery and sees his first sign of hope: an American tank standing at the entrance of the gates. This young boy was Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the gruesome events that occurred in concentration camps during WWII. Elie shares a chilling memoir about his experience in his book Night. Throughout the novel, Elie and other Jewish inmates constantly used their families as their primary motive to overcome hardships even while being challenged by tough circumstances.

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.

During the Holocaust many things that occurred in concentration camps caused despair among its prisoners.Mr. Wiesel tells about the treatment in death camps in his book Night by Elie Wiesel. He faced starvation, physical, and mental abuse. In 1944, Wiesel and his family were deported from Hungary. He lost everything including his family, religion, identity, and faith in humanity. Wiesel and his father were sent to Birkenau where they were held, but were later moved to a different death camp.

Throughout the duration of the Holocaust, many Jews witnessed the worst of humanity. In concentration camps, over six million people were killed and tortured. Among the people imprisoned in these camps was Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor. In his memoir Night, the many acts of dehumanization and cruelty that Wiesel witnesses ultimately leads to his loss of faith in both his god and humanity.

I honestly agree to what Elie Wiesel has to say, “when human lives are endangered when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Where ever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that pace must at the moment become the center of the universe.”

Many thoughts went through my mind while reading about Wiesel’s final experiences as a German prisoner. I felt pity and sadness for him. His last few days as a German prisoner were his most difficult. He lost his father, he went days without food and passed days out in the freezing cold. I was also impressed on how he fought through these events. Despite his exhaustion or hunger, he never surrendered his life. He found strength that he never knew he had and showed the readers how strong humans can be when their lives depend on it. If I could meet Elie Wiesel and discuss with him about his time during the war, I would want to tell him many things. I would tell him that the time he spent at the concentration camps made him the man he is today

Before Elie went to Auschwitz, he exhibited many positive character traits. (Such as Compassion, Depressed, and Friendly. An example of compassion that Elie showed before was on page 5 that said, “And Moishe the Beadle, the poorest of the poor of Sighet, spoke to me for hours on end about the Kabbalah’s revelations and its mysteries. Thus began my initiation. Together we would read, over and over against, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart but to discover within the very essence of divinity”(Wiesel). How he shows compassion is, Elie treats a man of lower social status with kindness, and the man repays him with studies of the Zohar. So a random act of kindness, could pay off someday, you never know. The next example of how Elie showed traits before Auschwitz was depression on page 10, “The Bible commands us to rejoice during the eight days of Passover, but our hearts were not in it. We wished the holiday would end so as not to have to pretend”(Wiesel 10). Elie was so depressed and scared, that

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.

Before Elie had been deported to the terrors of the Auschwitz, he was a completely different person. Some of the traits that he exhibited were hopeful, shielded, and religious. As Wiesel said in “Night” “There was joy, yes joy. People must have thought there could be no greater torment in God’s hell than that of being stranded here, on the sidewalk, among the bundles, in the middle of the street under the blazing sun.” (16) The town was not concerned about what was going on. They didn't believe that anything else would get worse. Elie and the people of his town were unable to accept the fact that anyone would do such a horrible deed. Elie and his neighbors were ecstatic because they thought nothing could get worse than it was already; what Hitler would do to them in the future, did not even seen imaginable. The victims believed that God would

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.

At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.

Author Elie Wiesel writes about his experience as a Jew in concentration camps in his book Night. Elie includes similes, pathos and repetition in Chapter three to illustrate the inhumanity towards Jews while in the concentration camps.