Symbolism In Night By Elie Wiesel

Over 5 million people died between 1933 and 1945. Additionally, around half of these deaths happened in a concentration camp. This point in time is commonly referred to as the Holocaust. In Elie Wiesel’s book "Night” that documents Elie Wiesel’s struggles in a ghetto and then being transported throughout Germany to these awful places that are made for death. However, in the novel “Night,” Elie Wiesel uses dialog, ellipses, and symbolism to show the bond he has with his father. (73)

"Never shall I forget that night the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed," -Elie Wiesel, Night. This quote is one of the quotes from Elie Wiesel's book Night that refers to the title of the book. The title of the book is called Night for reasons such as the fact that the first night was what changed his life, it symbolizes the darkness that encased all of their souls, and it also symbolizes how dark and evil the world was. The title Night has a stronger meaning than what it seems.

The Holocaust, or a jewish sacrificial offering that is burned on an alter, largely refers to the massacre and slaughter of over 6 million european jews from 1933 to 1945. One of the largest genocides took place less than 100 years ago. A recently fresh event on the historical timeline, and yet there would be little known on exactly went on inside the camps without the testimonies of survivors. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, produced the book “Night” as a way to cope with his time in the labor camps and to shed light on the reality of the inhumanity that engulfed numerous concentration camps across europe. After ten years of silence, the book was written by Wiesel to express his personal experiences inside the labor camps, as well as his testimony to horrifying and inhumane actions inflicted upon his beloved family and bunk mates. In “Night”, Elie Wiesel explores the evils in humanity by sharing his personal experiences and personal witness of inhumanity, and shares his own moral values of man.

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.

The terrors of the Holocaust are unimaginably destructive as described in the book Night by Elie Wiesel. The story of his experience about the Holocaust is one nightmare of a story to hear, about a trek from one’s hometown to an unknown camp of suffering is a journey of pain that none shall forget. Hope and optimism vanished while denial and disbelief changed focus during Wiesel’s journey through Europe. A passionate relationship gradually formed between the father and the son as the story continued. The book Night genuinely demonstrates how the Holocaust can alter one's spirits and relations.

One day, when Elie returned from the warehouse, he was summoned by the block secretary to go to the dentist. Elie therefore went to the infirmary block to learn that the reason for his summon was gold teeth extraction. Elie, however pretends to be sick and asks, ”Couldn’t you wait a few days sir? I don’t feel well, I have a fever…” Elie kept telling the dentist that he was sick for several weeks to postpone having the crown removed. Soon after, it had appeared that the dentist had been dealing in the prisoners’ gold teeth for his own benefit. He had been thrown into prison and was about to be hanged. Eliezer does not pity for him and was pleased with what was happening

In 2006, Elie Wiesel published the memoir “Night,” which focuses on his terrifying experiences in the Nazi extermination camps during the World War ll. Elie, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, is projected as a dynamic character who experiences overpowering conflicts in his emotions. One of his greatest struggles is the sense helplessness that he feels when all the beliefs and rights, of an entire nation, are reduced to silence. Elie and the Jews are subjected daily to uninterrupted torture and dehumanization. During the time spent in the concentration camp, Elie is engulfed by an uninterrupted roar of pain and despair. Throughout this horrific experience, Elie’s soul perishes as he faces constant psychological abuse, inhuman living conditions, and brutal negation of his humanity.

Strong bonds built upon trust and dependability can last a lifetime, especially through strenuous moments when the integrity of a bond is the only thing that can be counted on to get through those situations. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he writes about his life spent in the concentration camps, while explaining the experiences and struggles that he went through. Although, not everything during that period was completely unbearable for Wiesel. At the time when Wiesel first arrived at the camps, the fear instilled in Wiesel and the loneliness he would have felt forced him to form a stronger attachment to his father. That dependence towards his father gave Wiesel a reason to keep on living. In turn, his

Night, written by Elie Wiesel, tells the terrifying experience in the concentration camps that many Jews were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout most of the novel, Elie Wiesel tells about how many prisoners, including himself, lost faith in God. During the Holocaust many groups of people, especially Jews, were taken to concentrations camps and treated in the most inhumane way. Many were taken away from their homes, and lost everything that was once their own. In order to survive, many Jews encountered such brutal difficulties. They were worked to death, starved to death, killed, and all because they were Jews. Upon being taken away, many were unaware with what was happening outside their own homes.

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.

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When looking at the holocaust, it is widely known the devastation and pain that was caused by the Nazis; however when inspecting the holocaust on a deeper level, it is evident that the Jews were exposed to unimaginable treatment and experimentation often overlooked in history discussions. When looking at “Night”, Elie Wiesel was helped by the doctors in the camp when his foot was severely infected; although this is not the experience he had, many Jews were mistreated and even killed by the doctors. Many Nazi doctors that were assigned to Jewish patients were later found to have exposed the patients to horrific medical experiments and unnecessary treatments that commonly led to their death.

After Elie found out what a young boy did to his father, he asked himself, “what if he wanted to get rid of his father … [because] he felt his father growing weaker?” (92). This young boy’s thinking process wasn’t very intelligent. He thought being alone would give him a better chance of surviving. After the men came back from walking in the snow, Elie was a viewer of a boy killing his own dad when the father said, “you’re killing your father… i have bread… for you too… for you too” (101). The Jews had been through so much that they don’t even know how to treat their loved ones. They were even capable of killing each

The Old Testament is full of passages with encouraging words and wisdom. These motivating verses would have provided substantial strength to support Eliezer in the concentration camp in the novel Night. To get him through his time in camp, Eliezer should have remembered studying Psalms when he found no purpose in praising God, Numbers when he found nobody to trust, and Habakkuk when he found his injured foot slowing him down.

Thesis: Elie’s belief in his survival increases while that of God’s justice and his family diminish as he experiences the events of the Holocaust.