Elie Wiesel Research Paper

While Elie was in the concentration camp he changed the way he acted. This new behavior led him to develop new character traits. While Ellie was in the concentration camp he became angry at many things. For example “I would have dug my nails into the criminals flesh” (Wisel 39). Elie shows extreme anger when the Nazi officials are beating Elie’s father. Elie was angry because the Nazi soldiers were not treating them nicely and keeping them in poor conditions. Elie was usually not a person to display anger, but he shows this when his family members are being hurt. Elie wants to stand up for what is right and for his family members. Despite his studying, Elie wavered in his belief in Kabbalah while he was at the camp. Elie was a religious boy before he went to Auschwitz, but while in the camp, he became angry at God. In the book Elie says, “‘Where are You, my God?’” (66). Elie is wondering why God is not helping the Jews. Elie had complete faith in his religion until he experienced and witnessed such horrible suffering. He had been taught that God will punish evil and save the righteous. However, when Elie saw that God was not helping the Jews situation,

After surviving the Holocaust, Elie writes down the things he experiences as a young boy during that time period. As Elie enters Birkenau holding his father’s hand, he claims, “Never shall I forget the small faces of children whose bodies I saw transform into smoke under a silent sky… Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.” (Wiesel 34). Upon his arrival at the concentration camp in Birkenau, Elie witnesses young children being burned alive in crematoriums. He asserts that he has seen events so horrid that the memory would stay embedded with him forever. As soon as he witnesses the death of countless people, Wiesel begins to see the world as one filled with cruelty and hatred, the exact opposite of what he learns in his Jewish studies. In the end of his memoir, Elie finds himself in the hospital after being liberated by American soldiers. Elie looks into the reflection of the mirror hanging on the wall and describes what he sees as, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me” (Wiesel 115). After experiencing such traumatic events, Wiesel refers to himself as a new person. The innocent and religious Elie slowly dies during the Holocaust. In his biographical memoir, Elie slowly changes his

Elie’s faith before being exposed to the concentration camps is apparent and he works hard to strengthen and grow his faith. All throughout Night, Wiesel shows the eminent effect faith has on individual’s actions and attitude. At the beginning of Night, Elie’s faith is a key feature of his lifestyle and attitude. Studying under the wisdom of Moishe the Beadle, Elie can put his faith in retrospect as he says, “In the course of those evenings I became convinced that Moishe the Beadle would help me enter eternity, into that time when question and answer would become one” (Wiesel 5). It is very clear that Elie is very emotionally and physically invested in his faith. Before camp Elie was so eager to expand and connect to his faith in which he becomes, “convinced” that he fully understands his faith proving him to be a devout Jewish boy. Thus because, Moishe the Beadle is helping him “enter eternity” and build his faith. Elie’s whole life revolves

Elie Wiesel’s God is more than a substantial part of his life. When Elie first

Forty-two years after entering the concentration camp for the first time, Elie Wiesel remarked, “Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope” (Nobel Lecture 1). This means a lot from someone who endured almost two years of the terror in the WWII concentration camps. During these two years, Elie endured the sadness of leaving his former life and faith behind, the pain of living off of scraps of bread, and the trepidation of the “selections”, where he almost lost his father. He watched the hanging of innocent people, was beat by Kapos and guards time after time, and marched in a death march right after having a foot surgery. Through all of this, he survived because he remained hopeful. Hope was all the Jewish people

“Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.” ~ Adolf Hitler. The same stance that Hitler took against his military enemies is the one he used to kill each and every Jew from the inside, without ever using a single mortar, plane, or tank, and without specific action to do it. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a courageous, scholarly Holocaust survivor, many are desensitized and dehumanized through the Holocaust.

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.

The Holocaust was a terrible, dark time in the 1900s (1933-1945). Many Jewish families were broken up and killed. Elie Wiesel is one of the many who was saved from dying of starvation. Elie created stories based on his experience in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He used persistence while in these camps by not losing the will to live. Elie inspired many people to live life to the fullest, (he didn’t get to live the perfect life he probably imagined when he was little) even if you come across problems.

Two very different men have led very different lives, and yet, both of their works helped changed the world. These two men are known as Elie Wiesel, a human rights activist, and Larry Itliong, an American civil rights leader. Elie Wiesel, on top of being a Noble Peace Prize recipient, also received an honorary knighthood in London in the year 2006 (cite: Funk and Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia). He is also a renowned author, and has written over 35 books (most notably, Night). On the other hand, Larry Itiong was part of the 31,000 Filipino men who came to California to work in the late 1920s. Itliong devoted majority of his life to his work, standing up against the struggles faced by farm workers from age 15 to his death. Both men lived through

Everything that happened from this point on was barbaric and exhibited all the Nazis’ anti-Semitism and disregard for Jewish lives. The Jews were forced out of the cattle car under the threat of being beaten and shot, all their precious belongings left behind. The Nazi’s showed no regard and in a cold tone, “Men to the left! Women to the right!” separating families without any mercy. One of the first individuals they encountered was the notorious Dr. Mengele. He was renowned for experimenting with Jews: replacing body parts, testing life limitations. Out of complete luck, Elie stood in front of an inmate who instructed him and his father to lie about both their ages and their professions. However, Elie Wiesel was a good Jew, and under normal circumstances, he would never lie. ‘”I’m eighteen.”…”Your profession?”/Tell him I was a student? / “Farmer,” I heard myself saying.’ He wisely did as the inmate advised. “A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! ...children thrown into the flames.” At this moment Elie lost all belief in God. He heard his people praising His name begging for forgiveness which made him sick. Elie Wiesel was certain he was asleep, that this was all a nightmare, that he would wake up in his bedroom with his heart pounding. In the back of his mind, however, he knew this was no nightmare. This was real. He was ready to jump into the electric fence surrounding Auschwitz and end all his suffering. “Two steps from the pit, we were ordered to turn left and herded into barracks.” Elie Wiesel and his fathers’ lives were spared

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

While Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy subjugated to the violence of the Holocaust in Night, embarks on his atrocious journey in struggling to survive the brutality perpetrated on him, he loses his innocence in the traumatic circumstances. Wiesel’s main aspiration of writing about his development from childhood to adulthood is to showcase how cruelty within society can darken innocents’ souls. As Elie grows throughout the story, he starts to understand that he has changed from a pure, little child to a young man filled with distress and thoughts of danger. He reflects over what kind of individual he has evolved into because of the all the killings and torture he has witnessed: “I too had become a different

When Elie arrived at the first concentration camp, he was a child, but when left he was no longer human. Elie’s character changed through his encounter of the Holocaust. Elie idolized his religion, Judaism, one relevant identification for him. Elie spent hours praying and learning about Judaism, but it was the reason he and his family were tormented for. Elie was so intrigued by Judaism, that he wanted someone a “master” to guide in his studies of Kabbalah, an ancient spiritual wisdom that teaches how to improve the lives (Wiesel 8). Furthermore, he loses hope in God and in life. Elie only had a few items when he arrived in the camp, one being his family, but that would soon be taken from him. When Elie and his family arrived at the camp in Auschwitz, he was kept by his father. He always gazed after his father, caring for him until his death.

In 1944, in a village in Romania, a twelve-year-old named Elie Wiesel spends much of his effort and emotion on Jewish mysticism and the Talmud. Elie’s instructor, whose name is Moishe the Beadle, returns from an almost fatal experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the peacefulness of their lives. Disregarding Moishe’s statement, even when anti-Semitic measures force the Sighet Jews into supervised ghettos, Elie's family remains patient and compliant. In the spring of that year, the Nazi aggressors began shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complex. Elie's family is part of the final convoy. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can barely move around and have to live and try not to die on little to no food or water. One of the deportees, Madame Schächter, becomes mentally insane and has surreal visions of flames and furnaces.

Elie Wiesel begins the book as a religiously curious twelve year old boy. He requested to study the cabbala and encountered Moshe the Beadle, Elie’s cabbala master, at the end of 1941. Elie was very eager to learn and prayed every night. However, he began to feel no reason to Through the memoir, Elie inquired why God would have let the Jews be captured, moreover, tortured and burned in crematoriums. In the book Elie states, “I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger.” This shows that he no longer believes that he should pray because his faith after being in the camp for so long has been drained. While he questioned God, some of his fellow Jews felt they needed God more than ever. Elie’s tone when he recounts why he will not pray display how frustrated he was with God. He wonders why God allows such