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Harrowing Faith In Night In Elie Wiesel's Night

Decent Essays

I have begun reading Night by Elie Wiesel. This novel is about the events that Elie Wiesel endured as a teenager and harrowing truths about the holocaust. The first chapter was quickly paced and straightforward. A major part of Eli’s day was studying. A man Elie meets named Moishe the Beadle begins to cause him to question his faith and why he prays. The man is definitely different and this later causes the community to miss a warning sign of their impending doom. Moishe the Beadle is a foreign jew and is taken away months earlier than the other jews. He witnesses and miraculously survives a mass murder of foreign jews by faking dead. After returning to Sighet he attempt to warn the residents of what happened but no one believed him. This is important because at this time there were still visas available but since no one could fathom the idea of an attack on a whole population that included millions no one listened. Eli thinks, “Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means?” (8) I liked this explanation in the book because most holocaust books brush over the reason of not leaving when they sensed conflict besides fear and this seemed much more logical in the fact that it does appear to be unbelievable. Now something I had never heard of before was the self governed ghetto that was formed. The community was quite remarkable in the fact that Elie write, “ A small Jewish republic....A Jewish Council was appointed, as well as a Jewish police force, a welfare agency , a labor committee, a health agency- a whole governmental apparatus” (12). This is astonishing because you would think amongst the chaos and oppression of information that the society would begin to falter. Yet this isn’t the case, especially later on in the chapter when the guards don’t even watch the ghetto and the people can come and go. Now this event is confusing to me, it is said that a friend has made them a safe place to live and the family does not accept it. The father makes an excuse of wanting to be there with the mother and younger sister but the other kids can go. This didn’t make sense because shouldn't the younger sister be brought to the safe spot

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