When a son kills his father over bread, the meaning of Night is further brought to light. It is illuminated by the fact that Elie loves his father very much, how little food they were given, and how ruthless people had become to get what they needed. Since Elie loves his father so much, it helps signify the meaning of this death. “I held onto my father’s hand—the old, familiar fear: not to lose him” (99). Since Elie had such a deep love and a need to stay with his father, he was rather startled and confused when he saw that son, murder his own father. Elie and his father’s love held the test of the concentration camps for much longer than this son and his father.
Elie’s father loses his strength quickly, “his eyes [grew] dim” (46) almost immediately after arriving. The horrors which he had seen were easily enough to crush the spirit of a former community leader. His disbelief of the horrors he saw questioned the very basis of his soul, and he began to despair. His father’s eyes soon become, “veiled with despair” (81), as he loses hope for survival. The despair of camp life shrouds the human within, showing only another cowed prisoner. Elie’s father no longer can see hope, having his vision clouded by cruelty and hate. Elie’s father is eventually overwhelmed by despair; he, “would not get up. He knew that it was useless” (113). The Nazis crushed his soul, killed his family, stole his home, and eventually took his life; this treatment destroyed the person inside the body. He could no longer summon the strength to stay alive, so he gave up, and collapsed.
The one person in Elie’s life that means everything to him is his father. During his time in the concentration camps, Elie’s bond with his father
Setting (time and place): Early 1940s, during World War Two, Holocaust era. starting in Sighet, Transylvania, and moving throughout concentration camps in Europe.
The Holocaust changed the lives of many. Those that survived have many terrifying stories to tell. Many survivors are too horrified to tell their story because their experiences are too shocking to express in words. Eli Wiesel overcomes this fear by publicly relaying his survival of the Holocaust. "Night", his powerful and moving story, touches the hearts of many and teaches his readers a great lesson. He teaches that in a short span of time, the ways of the world can change for the worst. He wants to make sure that if the world didn't learn anything from hearing about the atrocities of the Holocaust, maybe they'll be able to learn something from Elie's own personal experience. Usually, a person can internalize a situation better
Elie Wiesel faces many conflicts throughout this memoir. In the memoir, Night, by Elie wiesel, Hitler works hard to eradicate the Jewish people. Fallaciously, he forces Jews into thinking they aren’t going to be harmed. Adolf Hitler houses all Jewish people in death camps for he is indignant and he needs revenge after the World War. Also, Hitler is being hypocritical because he says the only worthy people are Aryan people, but he isn’t even Aryan. He often instructs the Nazi Soldiers to make all Jewish people despondent about life. The Germans are to have no decorum with the Jews. They are told to starve, beat, and punish the prisoners. Throughout the story, Wiesel struggles with staying alive and with helping his father stay alive in aspiration
In the novel “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor suggests that when humans are faced with protecting their own mortality, they abandon their morals and values. This can be seen in both the Jewish and German people. The German’s are inhumanely cruel to protect their own jobs and safely by obeying government commands. The Jewish captives lost their morals as they fight to survive the concentration camps. Elie Wiesel encountered many obstacles that made many of his ideals changed drastically for Wiesel which was his loss in humanity throughout the book he explains the many ways he does not see people as people anymore. He also explains how all of his natural human rights were no more during the time in the Holocaust. He had to find a sense of self because he could have easily fallen apart. He could not have done anything different, he knew it was going to end poorly. Silence is a very important and prominent theme in this book as silence represents many key symbols such as. God’s silence: Eliezar questions God’s faith many times throughout this book and wonders how he could just sit there and be silent while people are mass murdering people.
Night begins with the narrator, Elie, talking about Moishe the Beadle, who is described as the “jack-of-all-trades” in a shtibl (Weisel, 21). He then continues by talking about his family. He goes back to talk about his deep conversations with Moishe and their evenings spent together. One day, the foreign Jews of Sighet, where he lives, were expelled. This included Moishe. They were taken away in cattle cars by the Hungarian police. Months past and one day, Elie saw Moishe sitting on a bench near the synagogue. He tells Elie about what happened to him; how he and the other Jews were transported and forced to dig their own graves in the forest. Luckily, Moishe had managed to escape. He had come back to warn the Jews in Sighet of what to come.
Furthermore, the title of a book can reference what happens during the book. Elie Wiesel chose the title Night to show how this was a dark time in his life. On page 37, Elie says, “The student of Talmud. . . had been consumed by flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me.” (Wiesel) The title Night is referring to the dark time in Elie’s life. If this book was titled Day or Dawn, some of the things that occur in this book wouldn’t be seen be seen by the reader as violent. This quote is when Elie is in Auschwitz during the first night. When he arrived, a part of himself was gone. This was when he started losing his faith. The title of a book can change how things are viewed by the reader. An author may choose the book because of something the characters do or something that happens to the characters. In Elie’s case, it was because of what happened to him in the concentration camps.
When he mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell backward off his chair by the side of the gate. His neck was broken and he died, for he was an old man, and he was heavy. He had led Israel forty years.
Have you ever had to make an instant decision that would significantly impact your life?
At the beginning of the novel, when the Jews first arrive at the camps, all they have left is their family, so they cling to them. During one of the work periods, Elie comes across two brothers, “Yass and Tibi, two brothers… whose parents had been exterminated… they lived for each other, body and soul” (Wiesel 50). This relationship between the two siblings shows, a bond that has been strengthened by loss. Elie includes this small tidbit about them to show that the Jews still have some hope and compassion still in them. Once news of evacuation hits the camp, Elie’s only thought is of his father, “I was not thinking about death but not wanting to be seperated from my father” (Wiesel 82). This shows the personal level of how the Holocaust affected the families in it. It shows that because family was the only thing that they had left, that was all that they could think about. The Jews lose everything when the arrive at the camp so they cling to what they have, their family.
In the memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel portrays the dehumanization of individuals and its lasting result in a loss of faith in God. Throughout the Holocaust, Jews were doggedly treated with disrespect and inhumanity. As more cruelty was bestowed upon them, the lower their flame of hope and faith became as they began turning on each other and focused on self preservation over family and friends. The flame within them never completely died, but rather stayed kindling throughout the journey until finally it stood flickering and idle at the eventual halt of this seemingly never-ending nightmare. Elie depicts the perpetuation of violence that crops up with the Jews by teaching of the loss in belief of a higher power from devout to doubt they
One of the central themes in Night was choosing not to know. People chos not to know for many reasons. On page 7 when Moiche the Beadle came back he said “They think I’m mad.” This quote might be short but it speaks volumes. They think he is crazy because something like to Holocaust had never happend before. The people he was telling couldn't imagine being forced to dig trenches then getting shot into them. The whole concept of the Holocaust was so foreign that none of them could imagine such a thing happening. The next quote that represents choosing not to know is on page 46. It said: “Mother is still a young woman,’ my father once said. ‘She must be in a labor camp. And Tzipora, she is a big girl now. She must too be in a camp...” This quote
Elie loses faith in God’s justice as he witnesses the way the Nazis treated humans.
As the most famous Holocaust theme author, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Elie Wiesel’s painful memoir novel, Night, records his personal nightmares as a young Jew during the World War II and impacts today’s world profoundly. The terrible living condition in the ghetto, the numb of the prisoned Jews to send the little body of Jewish children into the cremation chimney, the diminishing faith of Elie to God, the little hope of surviving and so on, too many such horrible scenes mingle in every reader’s mind and meanwhile arise a lot of questions. Aren’t those German soldier human beings? Why the SS and Gestapo have not any mercy to those normal elegant Jews, including those lovely young girls and cute children? Why most of the Aryan people just stand by during that time but not shelter the Jews? How can the people in a democratic German make their collective decisions to support the dictator Hitler? What’s wrong with that generation of people living in that land? Can we prevent such genocide happen again in today’s world?