“I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I cannot feel it. I believe in God even when he is silent”-Written on a cellar wall in Germany during the Holocaust. Many Jews went to concentration camps having faith in their God and thinking that they will someday be liberated soon. They had hope and faith in their god that they would get rescued while others had lost their faith the moment they stepped in Auschwitz. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a boy named Elie was fifteen when the Germans had reached his village and was separated from his family except his father, by which they traveled to camps in cattle carts. Everyday and night, Wiesel struggles with keeping his father and himself alive while they go from camp to camp. While Wiesel is living in these crucial camps, he experiences all these crucial events from babies being burned in front of him to own family members killing each other for survival. Every time people seem to bring up their god, Wiesel starts to lose and doubting his faith towards God. …show more content…
In the text, Wiesel explains how there is a scene where he is talking to a rabbi after he had gotten through selections, a process where the Nazi’s see if the inmates are in a healthy state. Wiesel reasons “It is over. God is no longer with us”(76). The rabbi had lost his total faith even though he is holy, but who blames him. Elie doesn’t blame him because he is starting to doubt God’s existence too. Wiesel point out “Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God’s mercy”(77). Elie is wondering where his God is in this moment. He is hesitating about God being there for them and helping them out. Elie doesn’t understand how God can do this to anyone if God is suppose to not make anything bad happen to this
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel there are many instances where his use of imagery helps establish tone and purpose. For example Elie Wiesel used fire (sight) to represent just that. The fire helps prove that the tone is serious and mature. In no way did Wiesel try to lighten up the story about the concentration camps or the Nazis. His use of fire also helps show his purpose. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times scaled. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, the author describes his own regression of faith while imprisoned in Auschwitz, the Jewish concentration camp. As a thirteen-year-old boy, Wiesel is a devout orthodox Jew living in a tight knit community within Transylvania. Wiesel’s life, before taken to Auschwitz, bases on his personal adoration of the Jewish religion and his pursuit to find a teacher of the Kabballah regardless of his father’s persistent discouragement. In the forward of the memoir, Wiesel explicitly declares that as a young boy “he lived only for God” (xix). Throughout Wiesel’s confinement in the concentration camp, his faith wavers as he bears witness to horrific and hostile crimes against humanity, which contribute to the thorough resentment and rejection of God in his own life. Wiesel’s shows his loss of faith through his diction, tone, and figurative language he
The holocaust unleashed unparalleled cruelty and suffering to a great number of people; Elie Wiesel survived these hardships, but his innocence was shattered. For this reason, he wrote Night to share his personal memories of his time spent in the concentration camps and details the transformation of his faith and understanding of God. Each person Elie writes about attempts to reconcile their agony with their faith, albeit many fail or have their faith transformed. In this paper, I will describe how Wiesel’s understanding of God transforms as he experiences tragedy and how the various prisoners come to terms with their faith.
In Night by Elie Weisel, his father fails to give an account of what he heard at the council meeting so therefore nobody knows what’s going on. Secondly, the sighet residents aren’t listening to Moishe the Beadle who has already experienced a concentration camp. All the Jews are relying on Elie’s Father to give them information because they think what Moishe said was false.Once everyone steps of the train, they find out that what Moishe said wasn’t false. It’s ironic that people believed Elie’s father instead of Moishe the Beadle because Elie’s father was a respected leader of the community and Moishe was not a prominent figure in the town of sighet.
A little over 70 years ago, Elie Wiesel survived a situation that many people could not even fathom. In 1944, Elie and his family were brought to Auschwitz where he nearly experienced death many times.
Have you ever imagined being stranded in a concentration camp left to suffer, in the book ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel depicts the harsh life a teenager and his father from the Jewish community goes through during World War II. It illustrates all the sufferings and troubles the teenager, Elie passed through while with his father at their homeland and after being taken by the German soldiers to work in the camps. The once happy loving family of four children is separated by the World war and Elie chooses to remain with his father throughout the cruelties. In the book ‘Night’, Elie Wiesel uses foreshadowing, imagery, and tone to illustrate all of the horrors that he encountered while his time at the concentration camps.
In the novel Night, Elie Weisel's purpose of writing this story is to ensure that anything relatively close to the Holocaust never happens again. The fact that Night was written about Elie Weisel establishes credibility. Elie Weisel was born in Hungary in 1928 and was then deported with his family to Auschwitz as a young boy. Elie wrote Night as a memoir of his experiences. This affects the readers by showing the novel is based on a true story which gives the readers a reason to trust and listen to what the author is trying to say. The author uses pathos in his writing as another way to reach his audience. Towards the end of the novel Elie "...wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel shows how strength helps one survive through the most horrendous of events. This strength is achieved by the Jews through religion. Religion is based on structure and the Nazis took this structure away from the Jews, making many of them lose faith in God. Elie, being quite young, was influenced by the entire event, which causes his to question his faith, just like many other Jews during the holocaust. As a quite innocent boy, he was introduced to the concentration camp with a pure heart, and originally was a person who truly was the definition of religious. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, however, Eliezer's faith falters by witnessing the painful death of many innocent lives, the harsh conditions of the
Kids tend to rebel against their parents as they grow older. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls his experiences with his family during World War II. His mother and sisters were taken away from him as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz, only his father remained. Elie Wiesel witnessed many terrible events during his first night at camp; the only thing that kept him in line was his father. Elie Wiesel’s father kept him from possibly killing himself. When Elie Wiesel lives in the concentration camp with his fellow Jews, he begins to question the fairness of God, who he had followed his entire life. Elie Wiesel lost faith in God, particularly the faith that He would use His divine power to help him, and he began to rely on his father instead, which gave him more reason to live.
There is one singular question that persists in humanity from the beginning of time, a question regarding the existence of perhaps the most influential figure in the universe: God. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel details his experiences in the holocaust, his journey from his small Jewish community in Transylvania to the subsequent concentration camps which housed him in his later youth. In this haunting account, Wiesel explores his own journey from a devout young man to one that will question his own faith, the existence of God, and how one could still believe in a “right and just” God after witnessing such atrocities.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, tells the story of a young boy surviving through the Holocaust. The story conveys the effects of this barbaric event on the boy emotionally, physically, and mentally. This crude, genocidal imperial impacted millions of people. This story focuses mainly on Elie Wiesel's perspective on the Holocaust; considering his many years of labor, servitude, and transportation through multiple concentration camps. At such a young age, he was put through torturous anguish. Throughout this story, he explains the effect of the Holocaust on him as a boy along with how he handled it.
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”, said Elie Wiesel the author of night. Elie Wiesel is a holocaust survivor, he went through 5 different concentration camps. He was dehumanized, malnourished, and abused. He lost all his possessions, his family, and his humanity. In Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, the German Army dehumanizes Elie Wiesel and the jewish prisoners by depriving them of family, food, and self esteem.
The greatest change to Elie Wiesel’s identity was his loss of faith in God. Before he and his family were moved to the camps, Wiesel was a religious little boy who cried after praying at night (2). When the Hungarian police come to force the Jews to move to the ghettos, they pulled Elie from his prayers (13). Even on his way to Auschwitz, stuffed inside the cattle car with other terrified Jews, Wiesel gave thanks to God when told he would be assigned to labor camps (24). After a few days in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel heard about the crematory and the fact that the Nazis were killing the sick, weak, and young. In his first night in the camp, Wiesel experienced his first crisis of faith: Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. …Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust (32).
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
Faith is like a little seed; if you think about the positive aspects of a situation, then it will grow, like a seed grows when you water it. However, if the seed does not receive water anymore, it will die, which serves as a parallel to the horrors and antagonism of the concentration camps that killed Elie’s faith. After the analysis of the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the reader can visualize the horrors and slaughter of millions of innocent people that occurred in concentration camps. Throughout the book, Wiesel explains how his faith in God was tested, as he was forced to leave his home, separated from his family, and observed the death all around him; he even witnessed children being thrown into huge ditches of fire alive. Elie felt abandoned, betrayed, and deceived by the God that he knew who was a loving and giving God. It was then he started to doubt His existence. Elie tried to hold on to his faith, but the childhood innocence had disappeared from within him, and he lost his faith in God completely.