During the Holocaust, the Nazi’s murdered an estimated 6 million Jews, which was about two thirds of the entire European Jewish population. To put this in perspective, the amount of Jews that were murdered during the Holocaust is about the same size as the population of Denmark. The Holocaust is a part of Jewish history that can never be forgotten, and the Jews who fell subject to this inhuman act will never be forgotten either. The Holocaust has changed Jewish culture forever, and has become the 4th crisis of Judaism. Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, Night, is an account of Elie’s terrifying experiences and memories of the Holocaust. This autobiography not only reveals many horrifying details and a first-hand account of the Holocaust, but …show more content…
On page 4, Moishe the Beadle, a poor Jew who Elie befriends, asks Elie “Why do you pray?” Elie responds to this question by asking, “Why do I live? Why did I breathe?” This passage reveals Elie’s devoutness and commitment to his religion and belief in God. Breathing is a natural act that humans do not have to think about. For Elie to compare breathing to prayer acknowledges that Elie believes prayer is just as natural and essential as breathing. The instinctiveness of God’s presence will guide and nurture Elie through the horror that he is about to endure. A person who lives a sanctified life is blessed, and believes that they are living life according to God’s plan and purpose. By believing in God, you are essentially sanctified and therefore are human. Elie’s life is sanctified because he is a devout Jew who does not doubt or question the power of God. Little does he know the horror that awaits him and his family. When Elie arrives at Auschwitz he begins to question the power of God’s. On page 44 Elie says, “I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.” Here, Elie is trying to still believe that God exists, but is questioning his motives and the reasoning behind the millions of people suffering under the Nazi’s. It is difficult to believe in a God that would permit such suffering and evil in the world. Elie’s sanctification, belief in God, and
The most important thing to Elie is God and he has devoted his life to God in Sighet. Elie goes to church every day and even studies ancient Jewish religion. “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple”(Wiesel 3). Elie is explaining how committed he is to his religion by doing this every day. Along with going to church every day.
Elie loses complete faith in god in many points where god let him down. He struggles physically and mentally for life and no longer believes there is a god. Elie worked hard to save himself and asks god many times to help him and take him out of the misery he was facing. "Why should I sanctify his name? The Almighty, the eternal, and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent..."(page 33). Elie was confused, because he doesn’t know why the Germans would kill his race amongst many others, and he does not know why god could let such thing happen to innocent people. "I did not deny god's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice..."(page 42). These conditions gave him confidence, and a courage to
“I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.” (5)
In Night by Elie Wiesel, the author reflects on his own experience of being separated from his family and eventually his own religion. This separation was not by any means voluntary, they were forced apart during the Holocaust. Wiesel was a Jew when the invasion of Hungary occurred and the Germans ripped members of his religion away from their home in Sighet. A once peaceful community where Wiesel learned to love the Kabbalah was now home to only dust and lost memories. Most members of that Jewish community were never to return, hell greeted them with open arms as they walked through the now rusty gates of Auschwitz. In order to survive unimaginable circumstances that were enforced in these camps, a boy had to hang on to his humanity. But by no means did humanity stay with the boy, being subjected to the horror of concentration camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel saw first-hand how members of other communities attempt to silence opposing voices. All of the pain that Wiesel saw inspired him to keep watch and tell stories for people who wouldn’t live on to tell them for their own families. Stories are what keeps a person alive and through Eliezer’s words that he puts down many are able to get a sense of closure in knowing what occurred at these camps. One story occurred on the first train ride away from home, a lady named Madame Schächter was beaten up for crying out against imminent death, unseen by others.
“Saliva mixed with blood was trickling from his lips. He had closed his eyes. He was gasping more than breathing.” (108) While Elie was at the concentration camp, he had to watch his father suffer from dysentery. By the time a doctor saw Elie’s father, the disease had progressed too far for treatment or medicine. Elie wondered why God didn’t give Elie’s father a second chance to live. This resulted in a major decrease in Elie’s faith in God and the Jewish religion because he didn’t understand why God couldn’t save his father. “One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live.” (109) In this scene, Elie was close to giving up on surviving the Holocaust. His father was at the last stages of his life and was suffering every minute because he had nausea, suffocation, and blood was all over his body. Elie wanted God to either help his father recover from dysentery or for God to end his father’s life quickly so the suffering could come to an end, but God didn’t respond to Elie’s prayers. At this point, Elie was so traumatized by the Holocaust that his faith had almost
Elie was a holocaust victim who was almost forced, by other jews, into a furnace, by order of the Nazis. “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” Elie was very religious before the Holocaust and yet on the first night at Auschwitz he lost his faith in God. He regained faith
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.
Page 34, “…Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” From this one quote you can most certainly tell that Elie has been living through some extremely tough times in his life right now. You can also tell that just being a part of the concentration camp and knowing that if you don’t die there is a good chance that one of your family members or friends will, it will always be permanently engraved in Elies’ memories. And this has definitely had a huge impact on his life “He was not alone in having lost faith during those days of selection,” Page 76. Elie is talking about the Rabbi losing his faith when he states that the Rabbi is not alone and Elie himself is also losing faith. The selection was when the Germans and doctors looked at how the prisoner’s were health wise and if they where unhealthy they would kill them and put them in the crematoria’s. This, however, was tough for many of the prisoners because most of them where starving and unhealthy, a lot of the people didn’t pass the selections, but those who did
It was in Auschwitz during 1944, at the time of arrival about midnight when the smell of burning flesh saturated the air. There was an unimaginable nightmare of a truck unloading small children and babies thrown into the flames. However, this is only one event in this entire tragedy of events to be remembered in order to understand how deeply literal and symbolic the book entitled Night by Elie Wiesel is. The novel brings light to the reader about what the Jews faced while in the fire, hell and night; nonetheless, the author portrays each and every day during this year as a night in hell of conflagration. "Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes." (Wiesel 20). When Wiesel arrived at the camp he counted the longest dreadful ten steps of his life; he realized that his nightmare has just become unimaginable.
Elie's struggle with his faith to God is a major internal conflict he has with him self in the book Night. In the beginning of the book, his faith in God is completly untoched. When questiond about his faith and why he would pray to God, he ask, “Why did I pray? Why did I live? Why did I breathe?”( Winsel Pg 2) His belief in a powerful and able God is untouched, and he cannot think of living without his faith in his religions practices, as it has been one of the main guides in his life. But this faith he has is shaken by his experience during the Holocaust and the events that took place, what he lives and what he sees.
The memoir “Night” is about Eliezer (aka: Elie) Wiesel’s experience during the Holocaust. He faces horrifying things that no human should ever have to endure. He survived and lived to tell his story. Dehumanization was a big part of the Holocaust because the prisoners experience was so terrible that it changed them, and others thought that corrupt acts would help them survive.
When Elie is ordered to go on a march, he and others witness a youth about his similar age being hung for stealing food. “I remember that on that evening the soup tasted better than ever” (Wiesel 63). This indicates that Elie had shown no emotion towards the event, and in turn was happy that he was able to eat the soup, even if it was at the expense of another individual. Additionally, as Elie’s father is dying towards the end of the novel, Elie shows no empathy towards him as he is being beaten by the Nazi SS Official. “I heard his voice...yet I did not move” (Wiesel xi). Elie later regrets this terrible event however, but this just suggests how he was corrupted at that time after seeing all those people suffer and not do anything about. It then ultimately it happened to his father, and he did not do anything about it. Moreover, Elie is very religious at the beginning of the story, and is eager to learn more about the Jewish religion. However, as the book progresses, he begins to lose faith in his own God. After seeing all these terrible horrors, he exclaims, “For God’s sake, where is God?” (Wiesel 65). This statement clearly validates that as he watches all this abomination take place, he wonders where God
During the holocaust many things pile on top of each other and God worse and worse. As Elie witnessed this he began to wonder if God was real and wondered why God would do such a thing. He realized this as everyone told their opinions about the crematorium, "oh god, master of the universe, I'm your infinite compassion have mercy on us" (pg.20). Elie prays aloud to God for aloud and tells him why would God do such a thing to people who had no reason to be treated a certain way. Eventually Elie had ups and downs with his
In the beginning Elie wanted to be a mystic of Kabbalah, but now he is just a broken soul that wants nothing to do with God. In the beginning of the memoir, Mrs. Schachter is screaming on the cattle car, fearing death due to this lady screaming a man on the car commands others to “Keep her quiet… She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal.”(Wiesel 26) Elie is shocked by this and wonders how this God could let this happen without intervening. Though, this was not the worst of it, through his time in the camps Elie sees things that he says his great God would not allow such as babies burning and even his own father being beaten for being sick. Everything mentioned here continous to give evidence to how cruel and evil humans are, and how willing they are to show their true
Elie wonders how God can let all the pain and suffering happen. Through the story, Elie thinks to himself on how God would let people kill others due to their religion how can they be so cruel, and not feel any guilt. This is earlier when Elie arrives at the concentration camps and is starting to see all the horror of being there for the first time. He doesn't know quite how to act to everything going on around him. He wants to believe and but can't because he is overwhelmed with everything going on. Elie starts to wonder why he should believe in God and bless his names “Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty Eternal And terrible master of the Universe, choose