Examples Of Identity In Night By Elie Wiesel

     The spiritual change in Elie was substantial. He went from a pious, devout Jew who spent countless of hours studying his faith. He never questioned God, but that is probably because everything was always good. During his stay at the concentration camps, Elie never stops believing in God, although he does question what he is doing. On page 64, Elie says, “Why, but why I should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death?…” This shows the

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,

Throughout a lifetime, people undergo many different identities to discover their true self. Elie Wiesel, the author of the memoir Night, suffered a major event that changed his identity forever. In his experience at the concentration camps during the Holocaust, Elie had to fight to stay alive even during the most resilient moments. This event shaped his life and brought Elie to endure different perspectives in his time in the camps. Eliezer’s identity changed throughout the memoir from faithful, to fearful, to hopeless.

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

Sometimes in life we are faced with challenges that threaten our identities. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel his challenge was the holocaust, and every aspect of his identity changed. He lost his faith, his appearance changed dramatically, and his lost his ability to care about things he loved most.

The Nazi army dehumanized the Jewish people by depriving them of love. Elie, along with most of the other people in the camps, aren’t really accepted socially by anyone. They weren’t accepted as a person, and no one even knew them by their names; furthermore, they were known by the number they had tattooed on their arms. On page 42, Elie says “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” By having their names taken away, the Jewish people had their social acceptance stripped from them. Also, their families were taken away from them, and they had to do whatever they could to stay with them. As Elie said on page 30, “My hand tightened its grip on my father. All I could think of was not to lose him. Not to remain alone.” By separating the Jews from their families, they lost the love from them. By depriving the jews of social acceptance and their families, they hardly felt any

Eliezer in the book mentions several times that the prisoners and him were no longer men. The prisoners in camp were broken down into shadows of the men they were before their imprisonment. This is because the Nazis tormented them. The Nazis treated the prisoners like animals. They put them in cattle cars, forced them out of there homes, and fed them the bare minimum they needed to stay alive. All of these things made the prisoners lose their identity as men. This helped the Nazi cause because it made the prisoners lose hope. Prisoners with no hope become easier to control, and that benefited the Nazis. Therefore the loss of identity of the prisoners helped the Nazi cause.

For example, he begins to think why would God put him through the torture and bad things that he has been through. Before, Elie believed and was very interested in his religion (Judaism). His view on his God and his religion changed because of things Elie saw, the things Elie experienced, and the things Elie thought and did. Beliefs and religion is something that is hard to manipulate and change one's feelings towards. The Holocaust had extreme effects on Elie, and which will also influence his future generations, which not only affects just Elie but the whole world because of people's beliefs towards mankind and

First Elie started to lose his faith. He wanted to believe that his mom and sister were kept safe but he was losing his faith. “We pretended for what if one of us still did believe” (Wiesel 46). He started losing his faith after him and his mom and sister got separated which has a big effect on his identity. He stayed silent in hard times. Elie was abused for no reason but he chose not to say anything about it. “As I bit my lips in order not to howl in pain” (Wiesel 53). Instead of standing up for himself, he lost his will to speak. One of the major points when he lost his identity, was when he lost his name. Elie’s identity was taken from him when they took away his name and called him by a number instead. “I became A-1137. From then one I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). When he lost his name he was no longer the same person he was before the holocaust. Elie felt like he needed to speak for all the Jews the lost their identity that couldn’t speak for

“In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men,” (page 37). This is what Elie Wiesel wrote in his novel “Night”, a memoir of his time in the Holocaust. The book talks about what he went through in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, and how he and other Jews were treated during this time. He gives a true insight into the lives and minds of Jews throughout their horrible experiences. It can be seen in this memoir, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, is affected by the events in the novel because of his loss of faith, his feelings toward his father, and losing his identity.

He writes, “Never shall I forget… the first night in the camp… that smoke… the small faces of the children… those flames… the nocturnal silence… those moments… Those things… Never” (Pg.34). The time that he spent in the camp and the things he saw will never leave him. Elie was only fifteen when he arrived at the camp and he went through so much. The events he witnessed would even be too much for some grown men. At the very end of the book he looks in the mirror at himself for the first time since before he came to the camp and says, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes will stay with me forever,” (Pg.115). This only adds to the things that will stay with him forever. For the first time in about a year he saw himself. He saw what the concentration camps had made of him. He was a completely different person not only physically, but mentally and spiritually also. That is something he will never

Struggles. Something everyone has gone through like failing an exam, or maybe losing a family member. Those struggles would probably be the end of the word for some people. But what Elie Wiesel has gone through far worse at such a young age. He dealt with being in a holocaust camp. He had to go through being dehumanized, starved, over worked and he struggled with staying alive. Something in him made him persevere through this horrible time. Stamina. During Elie’s time at the holocaust he showed stamina. He shown it though physical stamina.

The time Elie spent in the camps changed him forever, he lost all hope and lost the “desire of life” and that changed how he looked at humanity as a whole. His time in the camps crushed his hopes and dreams, and made him question his

In the beginning of this novel, Elie visits his Synagogue more than twice a day. Which is quite a contrast to the end when he loses all faith he has. “Yet the comparison with that biblical figure undermines the tendency to conclude that Eliezer lost his faith(Plank).” This quote, although seemingly contradictory, it proves that Elie sees what is going on around him, all of the death, cruelty, and prejudice, and comes to terms that, if there were a god, he wouldn’t allow man to tear each other apart like they are. “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust(Wiesel 28).” Elie sees flames coming from the graves of young children and infants. Seeing the young shoveling their soon to be eternity home then throw themselves into it is something he can not fully fathom. “In the depths of my heart, I felt a great void(110).” As he continues live through the Holocaust, he witnesses his father die right in front of him. This is something he lives with engraved onto the back of his eye

When Elie lived in his small town, he was very passionate about his religion. When he first arrived in the Concentration camp he became more faithful than ever. This shows that Elie is using his faith as an escape to reality. He tries his hardest to retain his faith