Examples Of Loss Of Innocence In Night By Elie Wiesel

When Elie and his camp were liberated he maintains his faith but it is extremely weak. Elie still wonders if God cares and feels like the Germans murdered his faith. “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: For God’s, where is God? And from within me, I heard a voice answer: Where he is? This is where— hanging here from the gallows” (65). Elie is experiencing the hanging of a child and Elie feels the Germans killed his faith just like the young child.

Ever since Elie was in the concentration camp, he has slowly lost faith in God as he “...did not fast. First of all, to please my father, who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him” (Wiesel 69). By not fasting like he did before when he was not in the concentration camp, it shows his rebellion against God as he has lost any sign of hope for God. Elie also decides to eat for the sake of his health and his well being in that situation as everyone was starving even before the fasting occured. His beliefs in God has changed from his past as it affects his views on God and his beliefs about him. The concentration camp had also made Elie question his beliefs of God as he asked himself “Bless be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves?” (Wiesel 67). Elie processes his decision onto why he should even pray to God as he had lost hope and signs of God ever since he saw the horrifying acts made in the camps. His views had been changed him from his past as he questions his beliefs and wonders why God has not saved them from all their misery. Elie had changed his ways of viewing his

“One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live.” Elie’s personal relationships are destroyed, he is faced with a question as to why he is still

In Elie Wiesel 's novel “Night,” we find the horrific life story of a father and son during the period of the devastating Holocaust. Elie and his father need to unite in order to survive through the excruciation. We find a transition of indifference by Elie during his Nobel Peace Prize. From his love for life to not caring about anything, Elie matures as the book progresses. He learns to value his father and stick together. In “Night,” Elie Weisel utilizes the fear of surviving in the concentration camps and allows himself to mature and undergoes the struggles which leave the future generations to witness and remember the atrocities of the Holocaust.

In the beginning of the novel, Night Wiesel really did quite grasp what was going one, when he first heard of the troops coming he never imagined what the outcome of their visit would be. Wiesel was like most children at his age, very naive and looked at the world with a sense of wonder and merriment. But when that dreadful day came and him and his family were taken from their home, he left his bed his house and his innocence. At first Wiesel thought the armed guards were trying to protect them from the war, but as he spent more time in the camps and socialized with the other Jews he then saw what was truly going on.(30). It was as if his whole world came crashing down and he did not know how to take it. He had to grow up fast because that was

One night, the leaders of Buna had left a cauldron of soup out, no one had dared to go near it but one man. The man was so hungry and was on the brink of madness and he no longer cared if he was going to die, he just wanted food and this is what led him to being killed. “Then, for no apparent reason, he let out a terrible scream, a death rattle such as I had never heard before and, with open mouth, thrust his head toward the still steaming liquid.”. During the first selection, Elie was terrified of being selected and getting killed. This led to him thinking about all the reason why he should be killed and how he was most likely going to be selected. “ My head was spinning: you are too skinny…yo u are too weak…yo u are too skinny, you are good for the ovens …”. When Elie’s father died, he didn’t cry or show any sadness whatsoever. Elie was so numb with the pain he had gone through that he was no longer capable of feeling. “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble

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

When Elie first arrives at Auschwitz, he is completely overwhelmed. He meets another inmate and the three are all very optimistic about their futures. This is not the case for all inmates, though. The very next person Elie meets has adopted an indifferent attitude about his situation, and has become so tauntrimized by the hardships of life in a concentration camp that he does not care if he lives or dies. When he approaches Elie and his father, his only advice is, “You should have hanged yourselves rather than come here” (30). Because of his traumatic experiences, the inmate has become so numb even death seems better than the life he is being forced to live.

“Blessed be Gods name? Why? But why would I bless him?” Elie says that on page 67 of this book. To me, when Elie says this, he shows his anger towards God and about everything that he is letting happen. He began to wonder, if he was God, why he was letting all the Germans do horrible things to them. However, this never made any sense to Elie. He was always contemplating the existence of God. On page 69 while supper

In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel the theme of self preservation and loss of identity plays a critical role in the development of Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) throughout the book. As Wiesel suffers through the tragic events of the holocaust, self preservation proves to be more difficult to keep and losing one’s character seems easy. Wiesel’s identity, faith, and his will to live start to fade as he begins to forms a new character, a character who remains silent. Losing identity means losing the values that makes up a character.

Elie has adapted to his environment and adjusted to how others act around him. At the beginning of the book Elie is unaware of the horrors of the Holocaust and was in denial of the Nazi’s coming to Sighet. The author shows his further optimism when he states, “... optimism soon revived: The Germans will not come this far. They will stay in Budapest” (page 9). He drifts away from these early beliefs as his journey continues. He soon starts to realize that this experience is a terrible one, and after fighting for so long he wants to quit and he even considers suicide, “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot” (page 86). Based on this quote from the book, we see that Elie was in extreme pain and was ready to give up. Towards the end of the book, Elie gets tired of trying to save himself and his father all of the time therefore he becomes selfish and is somewhat relieved of his father’s death, the author admits this when he says, “I did not weep… I was out of tears… And deep inside of me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!” (page 112). As the books states, Elie was very impassive by the end of his journey. This demonstrates his feelings from the beginning to the end of the book and Elie’s overall self

Elie and his father are taken to Auschwitz where they are separated from the rest of the family and first hear about atrocities such as the incinerators and gas showers. In the beginning Elie believes that everything is a rumor, a lie, that humankind cannot perform such crimes, but he soon is forced to witness the demise in front of his eyes. This is when his outlook on his faith starts to waver. While watching the smoke billow up from a crematory, Elie hears a man standing next to him begging him to pray, and for the first time in his life Wiesel turns away from God. “The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for?” (31).

Night, by Elie Wiesel, showed the devastation of Eliezer’s childhood and illustrated the loss of innocence through the evil of others. Elie Wiesel expressed to us that one’s own faith and beliefs can be challenged through torture and ongoing suffering. The novel, Night, allowed the reader to witness the change in Eliezer from one of an innocent child who strongly adhered to his faith in God into a person who questioned not only his faith and God but of himself as well. The cruelty is shown to him while in the concentration camp forced him to wonder if there was a God and if so why would he put him and the others through such torture. Through his suffering, Eliezer’s beliefs dramatically and negatively changed his faith in God and compelled him to experience a transformative relationship with his father.

Though faithful as they enter the horrific camps of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Buna, Birknau, Dachau, and Buchenwald, the Jews become capricious. They start losing grip and begin falling down the slippery slope of death the Germans set up for them as more horrors of the camps become unveiled. Soon after arriving in the camp and being told about the crematoria, he felt “anger rising with me [Elie]. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent” (33). This is the first time that his faith is challenged. After a few days in Auschwitz he “had ceased to pray. I [Elie] was not denying His existence, but doubted His absolute justice” (45). As seen, Elie is beginning to have doubts about God and therefore his belief and faith in him. Finally, when Elie is looking for God to come though he doesn’t and he asks,

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