Historical Representation: An Undervalued Paradox Essay

In today’s society, people tend to view the Holocaust as a horrible thing that happened and it won’t happened again. But nobody really understands fully what it meant to go through it, except for Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately, they were hesitant to share those moments that forever changed them. Elie Wiesel is not one of those people. As the author of the memoir Night, he uses repetition and imagery to try to fully express the amount of terror and suffering that they had to go through during the Holocaust.

The Holocaust: The Repercussion Everyone is different in the way they think, act and speak. These differences lead to disagreements and wars but there is one theory that connects even the most different people, archetypes. Archetypes are universally known symbols in every human psyche that further enhance stories, movies and other forms of media. Night by Elie Wiesel is a memoir about the real experiences of a Holocaust survivor named Eliezer and archetypes can be found within the book. The symbolic archetypes of corpses and night as well as the ‘Battle Between Good and Evil’ plot pattern help to guide readers into a further understanding of the victims’ perspectives because of the archetypal meanings of the symbols and the central plot pattern.

The Holocaust is an unforgettable event to anyone who had to live through the horrors of a concentration camp. Elie Wiesel is no exception. He was taken to a concentration camp in 1944 and lost his mother and father in the concentration camps. Mr. Wiesel was brave enough to step forward and share his experiences during the Holocaust, which he recorded in his book Night. In his book Night, Elie Wiesel uses irony, foreshadowing, and tone to describe the uncertainty of one’s future before going and while in a concentration camp.

Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the unforgettable tale of his account of the savagery and brutality the Nazis showed during the Holocaust. Night depicts the story of a budding Jew from the small town of Sighet named Eliezer. He and his family are exiled to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. He must master the skills needed to survive with his father’s guidance until he finds liberation from the monstrosity that is the camp. This memoir, however, hides a far more meaningful lesson that can only be revealed through careful analyzation.

As said by Audrey Hepburn; “Living is like tearing through a museum, not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can’t take it in all at once.” In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, the Holocaust took place in an order of layers. As time passed, the extremity was increased each chapter he succumbed to. Elie expresses raw emotion in his memoir, Night, and leaves you in a complete, utter state of wonder and sadness. Not only this, but remembering and cherishing the importance of all the emotions from this time in history. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, the theme of remembering is present before the Holocaust and in today’s society.

Between memoirs and history textbooks, two very different approaches to historical matters are dealt with: one appeals to emotion, while the other to reason and logic. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, he discusses his life during the Holocaust and what life in a prison camp was like on an emotional level. The treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Nazi guards is more appalling through the emotional description of a survivor like Elie Wiesel than through the contextual and fact based evidence found in a textbook. One such example of this is when Wiesel describes how when the Jews were herded onto the cattle carriages to move them from Geiwitz to Buchenwald, and how the Nazi’s distribution of rations led to the Jews eating snow off one another’s backs:

As Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel once said, “To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice,” that is why we are called to remember. Many movies, novels, and story representations of the Holocaust have been created in order to spread the memory of the past. An important part of remembering is learning, and therefore not repeating the same mistakes once again. Movies may find it difficult to represent the Holocaust accurately, while also giving it meaning and artistic expression. The writer, Edwin de Vries, and the director, Jeroen Krabbé, strive to represent the legacies of the Holocaust and Jewish culture in the film, Left Luggage (1998), based on a novel by Carl Friedman through a portrayal of the daily lives of Holocaust survivors and their children in late 1960s Antwerp, their direct confrontations with their memories of the Holocaust, and character development. The film shows us many examples of the legacy of the Holocaust as it is passed through the children of survivors, and how it continues to affect their daily lives. The audience understands the intentions through depictions of muteness and the necessity to remember.

The terrors of the Holocaust are unimaginably destructive as described in the book Night by Elie Wiesel. The story of his experience about the Holocaust is one nightmare of a story to hear, about a trek from one’s hometown to an unknown camp of suffering is a journey of pain that none shall forget. Hope and optimism vanished while denial and disbelief changed focus during Wiesel’s journey through Europe. A passionate relationship gradually formed between the father and the son as the story continued. The book Night genuinely demonstrates how the Holocaust can alter one's spirits and relations.

“Never shall I forget that smoke… Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever...Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes…”(page 34). Elie Wiesel, the author of “Night”, describes his experiences in the Holocaust. Elie experiences pain and suffering throughout his time in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, and he shares how he survived. In the book “Night” the main character, Elie, is affected by the events in this book such as loss of faith, emotional connections with his father, and his self changes mentally and physically.

The Holocaust claimed millions of lives , and the survivors witnessed an event incomprehensible to the remainder of humanity. Elie Wiesel, a burdened survivor of the Genocide, describes his own experiences in his autobiographical memoir Night. Throughout the years in the concentration camps, Wiesel and the other Jews witness countless events of Nazis intentionally dehumanizing the Jews. After hearing these brutal remarks for years, Wiesel begins to internalize these thoughts. His internalization is reflected in his writing as he often compares himself and the others to animals. He compares the Jew’s physical traits, but also the way in which they act. Elie Wiesel animalizes the Jews while personifying darkness to further dehumanize the Jews and show how the Nazi’s mental warfare continues to affect him.

The Holocaust was a time of great suffering and inhumanity. The novel Night, which took place during this time, was written by Elie Wiesel and talks about his teen self-experiencing the concentration camps of Auschwitz. This is related to the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas which is the story of a young German boy named Bruno who befriends a Jewish boy in a concentration camp. The many similarities and differences between the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the novel Night include their many themes of “inhumanity” and “guilt and inaction”, and the two also share and differ in the loss of innocence of the characters and how they develop in each medium.

Gender theory is an effective framework to interpret Jewish deportation because it offers valuable insights into the subtle power relationships between Jews and their oppressors. In order to effectively use gender as a prism of analysis it is necessary to venture beyond descriptive usage of gender; Joan Scott’s characterisation of gender as an implicit way of signifying power provides a sophisticated avenue to explore this topic. When applying gender theory to Schindler’s List, scholars should modify their expectations in light of Zelizer’s critique that popular culture cannot mirror the Holocaust ‘as-it-happened’. To resolve some of these challenges researchers can ‘triangulate’ popular representations with photographs to ensure that their scholarship remains rooted in historical fact. Ultimately, provided that researchers are cognizant of the limitations inherent within both Schindler’s List and photographs, gender theory is a highly applicable intellectual backdrop to examine themes of power, masculinity, and authority during the Holocaust.

Son of Saul is a historical fiction film that gives the jewish and nazi experiences within a extermination camp. Son of Saul authentically portrays the Holocaust through the perspectives of the Sonderkommandos and the Nazi SS by attempting to film every scene in first person with the camera focus on one Sonderkommando. The film is authentic, because its cinematography exposes taboos of Holocaust filmmaking as well as the juxtaposed mentalities of survivors and victims within an extermination camp in first person. The definition of authentic applied in this instance is something original with genuinely reliable value. This film’s cinematography is instrumental in the expression of these juxtaposed mentalities and Holocaust film-making taboos.

Firstly, “Night and Fog” giving out a lot of videos to shows how cruel that the Nazi is. But a traditional sociological thinker will not concerned these point. They will concern about what factor leading to Holocaust and the holocaust’s affection. Secondly, “Night and Fog” focusing on two kinds of people, the first one is the murderer—Nazi, the second one is the victims—the Jewish, the film seldom to investigate the other elements of Holocaust. But the traditional sociological is investigate all-around, such as the cause, consequence of the Holocaust, also the reason why Holocaust generated.

Francois Truffaut continued on to say that Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, made in 1955, was the “greatest film ever made”. The 30-minute film based on the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps after World War II combines Resnais’ own cinematography with original images and footage of the captives in their unfathomable state. The film is lead with a somber narrative that not only accompanies the sobering images being shown but both compliments them and puts them into perspective. Carl R. Plantigna’s chapter from his book ‘Rhetoric and Representation in