Figurative Language In Night By Elie Wiesel

The emotional connection Wiesel has to the injustice and inhumane acts from other people being a survivor from the Holocaust

In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a boy named Elie explains his experiences throughout the Holocaust. His family and other Jews were expelled from Sighet and ended up in a concentration camp in Auschwitz. During this time, the only thing the Germans couldn’t deprive the Jews was their hope and humanity. Within the memoir, the theme presented is, “We must never forget, never forget...Human hope & faith must never die…”.

Wiesel is commenting on the fact that everyone was living with false hopes and not really paying attention to the problem. The Germans had put the Jews in the ghetto, but they didn't interfere with anything going on inside until it was decided that the people were to be sent away. With the Germans temporarily out of the picture, the Jews would be the likely ruling force. But their need for hope kept them from realizing that they were captive. Instead, they convinced themselves that the ghetto was a safe, secure place. They were living in a fantasy land.

As their time in the concentration camp continues, the conditions there worsen. The prisoners are soon forced into a treacherous forty-two mile run in the icy cold, which makes them struggle between life the death. During this march, one thing keeps Wiesel’s will to live alive and that is his father. This shows one of Wiesel’s weakest moments, where he contemplates giving up numerous times. Exhaustion takes over his body, and the only thing he can think about is the pleasures that death would bring him. Wiesel’s mind overpowers him and he reflects, “Death wrapped itself around me till I was stifled. It stuck to me. I felt that I could touch it. The idea of dying, of no longer being, began to fascinate me” (82). However, his father needs him, and that is truly what drives him to keep pushing until the end. They stay alive for each other, which shows how much they really care about the other. While Wiesel rests in the shed after the run, Rabbi Eliahou, a very well-liked man, comes in looking for his son. He and his son have been sticking together for three years. Wiesel expresses that he has not seen him, without realizing that this is false. The Rabbi’s son purposely left him, to strengthen his own chances of survival. Wiesel is taken aback by this, and astonishingly begins to pray. He thinks, “My God,

One of the first impactful quotes is when Wiesel writes about his first night in Auschwitz, stating “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes,” (34). He’s speaking about how everything changed when he arrived at the camp. Where he was once carefree, he now had a burden. Where he once had faith, he now had a God who didn’t care whether Wiesel and his people lived or died. He’s not only speaking for every person, every man and woman and child who went through the concentration camps. Everyone went through an enormous

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

Lost hope, brutal disciplinary actions, and mistrust among starving men, Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, Night, sets in 1944-45 in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. An optimistic, 15 year old German, perseveres the harsh living conditions as a Jewish boy and is forced to abide commands of SS officers in concentration camps. Witnessing Chlomo Wiesel nearing death first hand made Elie realize “... there was no more reason to live.”(93). His father, his only blood, was a symbol of motivation to continue Elie’s desire to live. Without Chlomo, Elie would have approached death sooner. He could not abhor the thought of his father bereft of life, as he “slapped him as hard as I could”(94) till he was conscious. Elie grasps to the hope of being

6 million lives, all of those perished in the holocaust for nothing but their religion; So many died but some survived and one survivor in particular Elie Wiesel author of Night tells his story of how at the age 16 he was deported to a concentration camp with his father and saw what took to survive. In those moments where Wiesel is describing what happened is where we decide is hope really the reason he survived or was it is fear?

Elie Wiesel use metaphor,rhetorical question, and metaphor to demonstrates that dehumanization ultimately causes negative,mental, and physical changes in victims. Wiesel use of metaphor to demonstrate the loss of humanity. For example in chapter four page 63 Elie Wiesel states that “These withered bodies had long forgotten the bitter taste of tears”. To show that they did not cry. They did nothing to not die.

But in the concentration camps that Wiesel experienced, all he could think about was death. In his memoir Wiesel recollects the time he and his father had to run for miles to the next camp and who ever stopped would be shot; he ponders death and writes, “A small red flame...A shot...Death enveloped me, it suffocated me...the idea of dying, ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel anything”(Wiesel pg 86). In the beginning Elie Wiesel was a boy of life and love but now he is a boy that thinks about death and is scared. The Nazis inhumanly took the minds of the Jews and destroyed them. And along with their minds were their spirits as

When all the chances of breaking free from what was in store for them were pushed away, I wondered what would have happen if the Wiesel family had taken the chances they were given. If they had taken the opportunity to leave, maybe the family would be safe. Maybe they wouldn’t have had to face the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust; maybe the light behind their eyes wouldn’t have faded away along with their faith in God. Maybe, just maybe, the Wiesel family would have been all right, trying to restart a new life in Palestine, only to remain ignorant of what was happening around them…But ignorance comes with the consequences of harsh realization and the truth is never sugarcoated. The truth is cold and bitter, like poison forced down a person’s

The first two paragraphs of the memoir reveal about the author’s purpose is paradise is not really a paradise after it something will come, “A terrible word began to circulate soon thereafter: selection.” (line 11-12) This shows that everything was pushed faster than usual because there is a selection coming to eliminate prisoners that unnecessary

A person could argue that because of on page eighty-seven he says “And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed in,” could show that all humans have a strong instinct to survive, is a bigger theme. In the story Wiesel says “And he began to beat him with an iron bar… I kept quiet… What is more, any anger I felt was directed, not against the Kapo, but against my father.” Wiesel talks about surviving the concentration camps, but losing his faith in god is a bigger

The most compelling motif of Chapter Five in Wiesel’s Night is religious faith. In this chapter, Elie completely loses his religious faith because of continuous life in the unbearable concentration camp. The decisive point that caused Elie to stop believing in God, was God’s indifference to the Jews. People, even the blockalteste, were praying and praising the God despite of their God’s nonresponse. One instance in which this motif is revealed comes at the beginning of the chapter when Elie keeps questioning why their sufferings were recurring.

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.