Examples Of Hope In Knight By Elie Wiesel

“Never give up hope, no matter how dark things seem” -Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: the Clone Wars. In the beginning of the story Elie is hopeful at every turn. He has a bright, hopeful future and then he and his family are taken away. When they are in the ghetto Elie is hopeful that he and his family won’t have to leave. He hopes he and his family will be okay. However his hope is taken away from him. He and his family arrive and they take his group near a crematorium. Elie is hopeful that he and his father won’t be taken into the crematorium’s deadly fire. But when he gets inside the camp he wishes that he would have been killed by the deadly fire. Later on in the story Elie meets his Uncle Stein. His Uncle asks him how his wife and sons are doing. Elie doesn’t have a clue but lies and says they are okay. This renews Uncle Stein’s faith but later on his village comes to the camp and Stein discovers that they died a long time ago. This news crushed Stein and he died days later. He lost his hope. Elie watches this scene unravel and hopes that he won’t lose his last bit of hope, his father. However he would soon lose him. “No! I yelled. He’s(Elie’s dad) not dead! Not yet!” Elie on page 93 in Night. Elie’s last bit of hope, his only reason for living, is his father. His father slowly starts to fade away and Elie can’t let him die, because then he’ll be dead soon after. However what happened in their relationship might have been worse than him just dying. One day when he, his father, and a group of other prisoners are being transported. The prison guards began to throw bread in their transport and then men began fighting to the death. Elie watches a son attempt to

When Elie and his father first entered the camps, his father was struck and Elie did nothing to help his father: "What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails in this criminal's flesh" (39). This shows that, although Elie did not share a close relationship with his father, he still feels that he should stand up for his fahter for the fact that they are father and son. Elie is very violent in that he would have "dug his nails in the criminals' flesh." Evidently, Elie is furious towards the offender. Unfortunately, Elie does not do anything when his father is struck because he does not want to draw attention to himself. Nevertheless, the bond between Elie and his father does strengthen: "And what if he were dead, as well? He was not moving. Suddenly the evidence overwhelmed me: there is no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight" (98-99). Elie reveals that he truly depends on his father for survival. Because he believes his father is no longer alive, he loses all hope for surviavl. Although Elie expresses anger towards his father from time to time because he is being a burden, he still feels that his survival is meaningless without his father. The strong bond that the two developed once they entered the concentration camps proves that nothing can come between them so easily.

In the book, our narrator, Elie, is constantly going through changes, and almost all of them are due to his time spent in Auschwitz. Prior to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie was a very different boy, he had a more optimistic outlook on life. During the first few pages of the book, Elie tells us a bit about how he viewed the world before deportation, “ I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.” ( 3). Elie was, as he says himself, deeply observant and devoted most of his time to his faith. He spent almost all of his time studying and worshiping. At this point, Elie’s faith is the center of his life. Elie is also shown to do a few other things and has a few more early character traits aside from being dedicated to what he believes in. Elie also sees the best of people, a few pages later he says, “The news is terrible,’ he said at last. And then one word: ‘transports’ The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely… ‘Where will they take us?” (Wiesel 14). This is one of the only time we hear about Elie being worried or scared because of the Germans before Auschwitz, and still, despite the warnings that were given and the rumors circulating, Elie doesn’t think that the Germans are actually going to do all of those terrible things. Around this time in the book, Wiesel starts to become more emotionally weighted, but none of what has happened takes full effect until much later. There are multiple instances in the book where Elie is given reason to distrust or even hate the Germans, he talks about how the Gestapo treated him and his family on page 19 “‘Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!’ the Hungarian police were screaming.”. Yet he then goes on to say, on that very same page, that “Still our first

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 concentration camps were places of suffering. Elie described his first night at the concentration camp. “ ...Never shall I forget the little faces of the children , whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever” (Wiesel 32). Elie was a child, pretending to be older in order to survive. Elie was not much older than the children that were too young to work and were murdered because they were of no use to the Nazis. Being as young as he was, the holocaust affected his life greatly. Children are more susceptible to events that happen to them. They tend to remember the more prominent events in their lives. The holocaust was a very prominent event in Elie’s life and because of it, he lost his faith. Since he was so young he

In the beginning of the book, before experiencing life threatening difficulties, Elie was much more determined to stay with his family (in order to survive). Eliezer thought that his father was what kept him going and gave him strength, he was certain that the right thing to do was to stay with his dad. In chapter 3 Wiesel states, “My hand tightened its grip on my father. All I could think of was not to lose him. Not to remain alone” (30). In these sentences, Elie explains that he and his father needed to stay together. This quote also shows what Elie’s emotions were; he was scared to suffer through the concentration camp alone. Elie also shows his need for family when he says, “Franek, the foreman, assigned me to a corner... ‘Please, sir ... I’d like to be near

As things got harder Elie and Elie’s father realized that the only thing that was holding them from death was each other. They were each other's reason to live, nothing else mattered but having each other. While Elie was running with his father to the new camp he was thinking, “I had no reason to let myself die. What would he ( Elie’s father ) do without me? I was his sole support.” (86 & 87) They never gave up because they knew if they gave up, they would have gave up on

Before Elie’s father’s death, he would always fight to stay alive and convince everyone to keep fighting, no matter what negative obstacle faced him. Elie states, “As for me, I was thinking not about death but about not wanting to be separated from my father. We had already suffered so much… This was not the moment to separate… I did not return to the infirmary. I went straight to my block.

In Elie Wiesel's book, Night, the overlap of optimism and will for survival and faith kept many people in the Holocaust alive, including Elie Wiesel. The Holocaust was an agonizing time for many people. It was a mass persecution and murder of 6 million jews and 5 million non-jewish people. Some people targeted in the Holocaust were Jewish People, Homosexuals, the disabled, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, Communists, and Socialists. They were sent to camps most of the time. Those who were deemed fit to work normally would be anybody over the age of 14 and appearing to be healthy, anybody else was sent to be executed. The Elderly and Women with Children had no chance of being deemed fit to work.

For three days nobody had food or water and were forbidden to leave the barrack. Everyone was weak and skinny, they were on the verge of living or dying. They were shoved into a transport car, and Elie tried to wake his father up but got no response. He was worried that he was dead, and he realized there was no reason to live. “Suddenly, the evidence overwhelmed me: there was no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight” (Wiesel 99). The only reason he had the will to live was his father, and that proves that family is all you have in a situation like his. The reason is Elie, who has had many beatens, starved for days on end, and lived in horrible conditions was only doing it for his

Holocaust narratives are often stories of maintaining hope throughout inhuman treatment, but there is more to it than that. In the case of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, first published in English in 1960, hope is denial. Hope is, prior to Elie and his family being sent to Auschwitz, the denial that extermination is imminent. Hope is the denial that what they have heard about the Nazis is true, allowing them to complacently live in a ghetto and then be shipped off by train to a concentration camp. However, after they have arrived hope takes on a new form. Hope is no longer an act of self-destruction, but instead an act of self-preservation. For Elie, to hope in a concentration camp is to deny the very real possibility that his father, Shlomo, will not survive until the end of the war, and for Shlomo hope is the denial that his son will die. For each of them, the hope required to continue living is not the hope that they themselves will survive the war, but instead the hope that the other one will. In Elie’s memoir, hope is both a pathway towards death and survival.

Upon arriving at the camps, the SS guards forced the families to be separated by gender. By sticking by his father’s side, Elie knowingly veres away from his mother who can’t offer any protection against the guards. ‘“Eight words spoken … we were alone”’ (Wiesel 27). Elie realizes how attached he was the his mother and that they were being sent straight into the crematory for one reason, because they were useless to the German SS guards. In this moment, Elie was beyond scared with what was to happen to him and his father. They could be going straight into the crematory or to fight in the war or just sit around and do nothing. Later we find out that the two men along with many others were worked hard and looked after by ruthless people. Being around his father made Elie realize that his father was making an effort in trying to understand Elie and how they would survive the camp as a family. Splitting up their family took a toll on Elie because he is so close with his mother and sisters and it feels like there is a whole inside his heart because he couldn’t protect them like his father protects him. Elie now knows that his mother will love him unconditionally even though she is dead and that his mother will be watching over Elie and his father as they attempt to survive the

Before Elie went to the concentration camp, Auschwitz, he had many character traits such as innocents , fearful, and unknowing. Elie wrote in the book ¨Night¨ on page (xix), ¨I shall never forget that night the first night at camp...¨ Elie was very afraid as soon as he got to the camp. He didn't know what was in store for him and didn't understand what was going on. His innocents showed threw making it easy to see he didn't know

In Night Elie Wiesel explains his life in the holocaust, he focuses on what happened to him and those around him, but at the end of the day he always had hope, in the song ¨Hope¨ by Natasha Bedingfield she doesn't give up and everyday is a new day and Elie has that same point of view. For example,in Night, ¨We breathed in air filled with fire and smoke, and our eyes shone with hope.¨ (page 60, Wiesel), even though all these terrible things are happening Elie still got through them and had hope through most of it.The song ¨Hope¨ by Natasha Bedingfield ties in with Night because even when you have a bad day and feeling like hope is gone everyday is a new day, start your next day with positive attitude. For example,¨Remember morning

“These optimistic speeches, which no one believed, helped to pass the time. The few days we lived here went by pleasantly enough, in peace. There were no longer questions of wealth, of social distinction, and importance only people condemned to the same fate-still unknown” (Night 20). Elie and the others Jews from his community lose some of their innocence when placed on the train to go to the camps. Overall, nobody seemed to think they would actually be doing this and at first still had hope. After being forced on the train they lost some of that hope they had, and because they didn 't think of what would happen and had no idea what to expect as a result. “Life in the cattle cars was the death of my adolescence. How quickly I aged. As a