American author, Ursula K. Le Guin, once stated, “In our loss of fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.” Between the timeline of 1933 through 1945, people witnessed the massive genocide of innocents single-handedly conducted by Adolf Hitler. Within the concentration camps implemented by Adolf Hitler, people struggled to survive, and the people who failed to survive, died miserably. While surviving, some resorted to religion in order to fortify their well-being and state of mind. On the contrary, some individuals lost their religion due to their unimaginable experience in the concentration camps. The memoir Night, reminisces Elie …show more content…
The presence of god seems imperceivable, therefore, he struggled to maintain his belief. In Elie's arrival in Auschwitz, Elie’s family and others split in groups. As Eliesel held with his father, a holocaust veteran confronted the two and asked them for their age. The veterans told them to state “18 and 40” in response to the guards in Auschwitz. Elie and his father did what they did in order to survive. Ordered to move to the left side of the line, they felt happy until they realized the left side meant a death sentence. Wiesel states, “Everybody around us was weeping. Some began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don’t know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves. For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify, his name” (32). In moments of extreme desperation, at the end of all things, these men fall back on religion. However, Elie questioned the action of sanctifying the lord. He failed to obey reciting Kaddish because God did not enforced the actions of the Nazi’s. The visual of jews slowly dying in the crematorium provoked him to question about God’s presence. Therefore, he struggled to maintain his religion which represents internal conflict. The author Elie Wiesel shows internal conflict, in his memoir Night, to display the loss of religion throughout the book. The experience that Moishe went through changed his
“I have not lost faith in God [despite] moments of anger and protest; sometimes I have been closer to him for that reason.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains the struggle of his changing beliefs in God during the Holocaust in his memoir Night. In Night, Elie Wiesel, a religious boy, is taken to several concentration camps along with other Jews, and separated from everyone in his family except for his father. He and his father live dangerous lives in the concentration camps, from being beaten, watching other prisoners die, and being close to death, until eventually Elie’s father dies and the camp is liberated. As Elie Wiesel’s time in the Holocaust lengthens, his devoutness in God begins to diminish.
When one experiences that he cannot tolerate, he doubts his religion and his God's existence. Elie Wiesel's Night, a memoir of the author's experience of the Holocaust, shows that this hypothesis was true. In contrast to the beginning where Elie Wiesel considered praying as an unquestionable action, throughout his memoir, his faith in God gradually vanished as he experienced the "Hell". Elie Wiesel confided his change of the faith in God by the usage of dialogue, repetition, and irony.
During the Holocaust, Eliezer Wiesel changes from a spiritual, sensitive, little boy to a spiritually dead, dispassionate man. In his memoir, Night, Elie speaks about his experiences upon being a survivor of the Holocaust. The reader sees how Elie has changed through his experiences in Sighet and the ghettos in comparison to what it was like for him in the concentration camps.
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
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
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.
“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).
Strong bonds built upon trust and dependability can last a lifetime, especially through strenuous moments when the integrity of a bond is the only thing that can be counted on to get through those situations. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he writes about his life spent in the concentration camps, while explaining the experiences and struggles that he went through. However, not everything during that period was completely unbearable for Wiesel. When Wiesel arrived at the first camp, Birkenau, the fear instilled in him and the loneliness he would have felt forced him to form a stronger attachment to his father. That dependence towards his father gave Wiesel a reason to keep on living. In turn, his father was able to support Wiesel and make the experiences in the camps a bit more manageable.
Eliezer begins to lose his faith in God when he first arrives at the concentration camp in Auschwitz. After Eliezer arrives in Auschwitz he catches people praying to God: “ For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to to thank Him for” (33)? Elie and his father have just been separated from the rest of their family, and are quickly losing the little hope they have that they will be able to get out of there alive. EIie sees a truck full of babies being unloaded and thrown into a fire, and he wonders why God is doing absolutely nothing to stop it. Later in the book on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, “What are You, my God? I thought angrily… Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves (66-67)? In this quote from the book, Eliezer is questioning God and asking him why he should praise him. Elie has lost his faith in the idea that God will save the Jews from their horrible imprisonment. Elie starts to believe that man is stronger and greater than God, and that he is alone in a world without God.
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
Society has long debated the direction of the effect religion has on people, and in Elie Wiesel’s Night, a book where Eliezer is torn from his home into a ghetto then liquidated into multiple concentration camps, all, while his father, himself and the other jews are tortured, beaten, and worked to death by Nazis and their partners, Elie Wiesel uses Eliezer’s faith to show the resilient nature of religion through anything, even hardship. Elie Wiesel shows that maintaining religion is so important, it is impossible to permanently undo.
Never again will such a great genocide happen. The story Night was written by Elie Wiesel about his horrific experiences during the Holocaust of World War 2. This story provides an insight to cruelty that has affected millions in incomprehensible ways.
Unfortunately, the stay in the camps worsened thousands of people's trust in their God, including a young boy who loved his religion more than anything, a teenager named Elie Wiesel. When first introduced to the younger version of the author, he’s extremely religious. Unlike other children his age who may go play with others after school, Elie preferred to “[study] the Talmud and by night [he] ran to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the
When Elie arrived at the first concentration camp, he was a child, but when left he was no longer human. Elie’s character changed through his encounter of the Holocaust. Elie idolized his religion, Judaism, one relevant identification for him. Elie spent hours praying and learning about Judaism, but it was the reason he and his family were tormented for. Elie was so intrigued by Judaism, that he wanted someone a “master” to guide in his studies of Kabbalah, an ancient spiritual wisdom that teaches how to improve the lives (Wiesel 8). Furthermore, he loses hope in God and in life. Elie only had a few items when he arrived in the camp, one being his family, but that would soon be taken from him. When Elie and his family arrived at the camp in Auschwitz, he was kept by his father. He always gazed after his father, caring for him until his death.